This Day in Presidential History (Birth of Jimmy Carter, ‘Dasher’ From Plains)

Oct. 1, 1924— Jimmy Carter, who rose improbably from a humble speck on a map to the highest office in the land, was born in a hospital in Plains, Ga.—the first Oval Office occupant who came into the world in this formal medical institution.

Plains left its imprint on Carter in all kinds of ways. Indeed, it lies at the heart of one of the paradoxes of his life: a leader of fierce ambition who nevertheless kept coming back to a community and way of life where he could be of service.

Not that he never had the opportunity to leave for good, or that others didn’t want him to move. For instance, wife Rosalynn (a fellow Plains native) regarded it as a “monumental step backward” when he announced he was resigning from the U.S. Navy in 1953 to return to the town where his father Earl had made a difference in the life of other residents as a successful businessman who continually aided others.

When Carter’s Presidency ended after a single term in 1981, he didn’t go on the lecture circuit where he could charge exorbitant fees to business and industry groups, or hobnob on Martha’s Vineyard with fashionable culturati, but went back to Plains, where, finding the family peanut business $1 million in the red when placed in a blind trust during his President, they began to pare down their debt as they started a new life.

Trust me: It can be difficult blogging about a person or event in such a way that readers come away having learned anything new. No matter how often one may return to someone as consequential as a President, no single post, no matter how intrinsically interesting (as I believe was the case with Carter’s energy policy, recounted here), can do justice to a career.

For that reason, when I can, I try to write about something I’ve experienced directly relating to that. Fortunately, there were two such events relating to Carter.

The first involved not President Carter, but candidate Carter. Back in 1976, when he first ran for President, he had devoted much of his early resources to the Iowa Presidential caucus, effectively putting that state on the political map by placing first among the Democratic contenders. 

The code name that the Secret Service initially used for him, “Dasher,” testified to the tireless marathon campaign he subsequently conducted until his victory that fall.

The New Jersey Democratic primary, though held in June, was nothing like the afterthought it’s become in recent quadrennial cycles.

As a high school sophomore then in the first week of June, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to see a potential President once I learned Carter was coming to my hometown of Englewood, NJ.

(I felt the same way in 1984, when Gary Hart came to Bergen County. I’m afraid that the candidate subsequently got into hot water when he took literally the musician warming up the crowd for him, Stephen Stills, when he performed “Love the One You’re With.”)

The 1976 Carter appearance in Englewood occurred at Galilee United Methodist Church, whose primarily African-American congregation was emblematic of one of a major component of the base he was cobbling together in a campaign that took the Democratic establishment by surprise.

Carter was introduced to the crowd by civil rights icon Andrew Young, eloquently vouching for him as an exemplar of a “New South” shedding its segregationist past at long last—a characterization all the more helpful for any in the audience who recalled the candidate’s remarks only two months before in which he used the phrase “ethnic purity” to defend the purity of white neighborhoods in cities.

(After his election, Carter appointed Young U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations—then forced his resignation two years later in the fallout over an unauthorized meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization.)

I don’t recall any policy positions that Carter enunciated that afternoon—he had carefully blurred many of them throughout the primary season—but I vividly remember, as he vigorously shook one hand after another, that grin so toothy that it became the fallback feature for cartoonists during his Presidency.

And I recollect the circumstances he faced then: Major rivals on the right (George Wallace, Henry Jackson) and the left (Morris Udall) had lost losing key primaries, leaving only Sen. Frank Church, Gov. Jerry Brown, and aging party lion Sen. Hubert Humphrey in a last-ditch “Anybody But Carter” movement.

The key takeaway of Carter’s address, then, in between his usual stump speech that he would be offering “a government as good as its people” to a country sick of Washington, was that the Democratic powers that be were united against him.

If this moment in time has any significance at all now, it’s as a foreshadowing of what happened with the Republicans 40 years later, when alarmed party leaders mounted their own effort against a candidate they feared would not make it that fall: Donald Trump.

In both campaigns, the leading candidate had built up too high a delegate candidate—and there were still too many candidates dividing the opposition to him—for the “Stop” movement to work.

The second event related to Carter that I was involved with, indirectly, came after he left office. Not only, like most 20^th century Presidents, did he want to write a memoir giving his side of the story, but, with so much debt hanging over his head from the decline of the peanut business, he wanted to do so quickly.

Still, he wanted to do a good job of it—so, as he had done before he delivered his disastrous “crisis of confidence” speech in 1979, he called together the best minds he could think of for their advice. One such expert was the college professor I had for a year-long seminar on the American Presidency.

So my professor polled his experts—his students—on the single subject they wanted the President to cover.

I don’t think my topic was unusual. As much as anything else, the protracted Iranian hostage crisis had conveyed an image of American impotence, and had probably crystallized for the public a growing sense of Carter as incompetent. The Iranian militants had already given signs of growing radicalism. Why, then, had Carter agreed to admit the Shah of Iran for cancer treatment?

Carter insisted that he’d been told that the Shah was so close to death that the treatment he required was only available in the U.S. (It turned out, as Robin Young and Samantha Raphelson reported for Boston’s NPR affiliate WBUR in January 2020, that David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and former shah attorney John J. McCloy exaggerated the lack of medical options available to the Shah.)

The group gathered to meet Carter in 1981 included among its luminaries Edmund Morris. The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Theodore Roosevelt urged the ex-President to concentrate on creating a narrative, stressing that Carter’s was a great story that demonstrated the possibilities of America.

Published a year later, Carter’s Keeping Faith turned out to be in much the same vein as nearly all Presidential memoirs: stodgy and self-justifying, not one that most readers would enjoy reading. Maybe he just needed time to find his voice and best subject matter, though: An Hour Before Midnight, his memoir of growing up in Plains, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2002.

What struck me about Carter’s meeting with these historians was less what he (or they) said or did but how he appeared—or, rather, how he and Rosalynn appeared. The sofa where the two sat was quite large, my professor recalled, but the former First Couple sat so close together that it represented a casual, maybe even unconscious, indication of their comfort in each other’s company, the product of a marriage that lasted 77 years—the longest in Presidential history.

With so much of Carter’s career turning on improbabilities, maybe the greatest of all might be the final chapter going on now. The former President has been in hospice care for 19 months, a far cry from the six months that 90% of such patients undergo.

He has defied the medical odds, just as he defied the low expectations of those who met him for the first time years ago. He has outlived some of his detractors and earned the surprised respect of others (including me) who regard him as a model for a modern ex-President.

Surely, Carter regards his longevity as a blessing—but even many Americans who thought of him as ultimately a failed President are likely to see what he has served as an active private citizen as a blessing to his country

This Day in Presidential History (Truman Pledges ‘Fair Deal’ in State of the Union Message)

Jan. 5, 1949—Two months removed from an electrifying “whistle-stop” election victory over Thomas Dewey, Harry Truman urged the passage of legislation that the GOP-dominated Congress had ignored in the last session.

The President termed the laws proposed in his “State of the Union” message as “The Fair Deal”—a phrase meant to evoke for Americans the far-reaching progressive legislation championed by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt as, respectively, the “Square Deal” and the “New Deal.”

Presidents tend to wax most optimistic in these annual messages to Congress after successful reelection campaigns, and Truman was no exception. He had not only succeeded in his bid to gain a full term in the White House in his own right following FDR’s death, but also now had returning Democratic majorities in the House and Senate that had been lost with the 1946 midterm election.

But the power of those majorities, while representing an improvement over the “Do Nothing Congress” that Truman derided in his campaign, was less than it seemed. 

Memories of the Great Depression that left millions out of work and devastated the economy had receded, leaving conservatives with little reason to agree with the President that “We cannot afford to float along ceaselessly on a postwar boom until it collapses….Instead, government and business must work together constantly to achieve more and more jobs and more and more production.”

Moreover, Southern Democrats had achieved seniority in Congress, giving them the leverage to block the civil-rights legislation the President advocated, such as cloture reform to reduce the number of votes necessary to end filibusters on voting rights and anti-lynching bills.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas could not reconcile the liberal and conservative wings of the party. While Truman could count on the GOP's principal voice on foreign policy, Arthur Vandenberg, to back his renunciation of isolationism, Robert Taft, as chair of the Republican Policy Committee, was far less willing to cooperate on domestic affairs. He was able to maintain a tight hold on the GOP, leaving the Democrats with a majority on paper only.

Just how much leverage Taft could exert was demonstrated in the fate of the President’s housing bill, which only passed by five votes in the House of Representatives—and even then only because Taft had weakened the original proposal and his “yea” vote gave coverage to Republicans wavering on the issue.

Truman did end up winning his requested increase in the minimum wage and broader social security coverage. But the rest of his package went nowhere, with Taft even authoring an article declaring, “The Fair Deal is Creeping Socialism.”

Yet Truman’s proposals established agendas pursued by later Democratic Presidents—notably Lyndon Johnson, with his civil-rights and Medicaid legislation of the mid-1960s.

Incidentally, 36 years later, Gerald Ford recalled, in his own State of the Union message, how, as a freshman Congressman, he had heard Truman report that “The state of the union is good.” 

In contrast now, Ford said, the state of the union was not good, as he cited high unemployment, a recession and inflation, an increased national debt, plant capacity and productivity not rising fast enough, lack of energy independence, and the people questioning “their Government's ability to make hard decisions and stick with them.” 

In the end, Ford’s domestic proposals made about as much headway as Truman’s, and for the same reason: de facto majorities in both houses of Congress that effectively watered them down at least, or balked completely at worst.

This Day in Presidential History (Truman Stuns Dewey in Whistle-Stop Win)

Nov. 2, 1948—Harry Truman went to bed this night with most observers predicting he would lose the election badly to Republican challenger Thomas Dewey. 

But, in a result that astonished politicians, pundits, and pollsters who’d written him off long before, the President pulled off probably the greatest electoral upset in the 20^th century, leading Dewey to concede at 11 o’clock the following morning.

The New York governor could have been forgiven if he had started measuring the drapes in preparation for moving into the White House. 

Dewey had been a successful mob-busting Manhattan prosecutor before winning two gubernatorial races in the nation’s most populous state; had prior experience as a Presidential candidate, running a creditable campaign against the formidable Franklin Roosevelt; and headed a Republican Party far more firmly united than Truman’s Democrats, who were suffering schisms on its left wing by Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party and on the right by Strom Thurmond’s states-rights (or “Dixiecrat”) Party.

Even at the Philadelphia convention that nominated him, some cynics had carried signs parodying the Missourian’s campaign tune: “I’m just mild about Harry.”

Why, then, did Truman emerge victorious? 

Historians would later point out that he’d cobbled together, for the last truly cohesive time, the New Deal coalition of urban ethnics, union members and southern whites that had sustained Roosevelt; that he’d achieved wider margins in the Midwest and West than anyone expected; and that, in contrast to the open, frank nature that made Truman a natural on the stump, Dewey was so infuriatingly reserved that tart-tongued Alice Roosevelt Longworth had dubbed him “the man on the wedding cake.”

All of that, to one degree or another, is true. 

But I have another theory why he won.

Faced with adversity, Truman displayed an intelligence, equanimity, and unwillingness to buckle under pressure that had served him well at key moments in adulthood, such as when he led his battery under fire in the Meuse-Argonne campaign in WWI and won his reelection campaign as U.S. senator from Missouri in 1940 against the state’s popular governor. 

He had made one tough decision in the Oval Office after the death of FDR: dropping the atomic bomb, launching the Berlin Airlift, recognizing the new state of Israel, and desegregating the armed forces.

No wonder his future Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, came to think of him as “the captain with the mighty heart.”

Perhaps nothing epitomized his battling, never-say-die spirit better than his famous “whistle-stop campaign” in 1948. 

From July to October, the President launched three major tours totaling 31 days through much of the country, delivering a series of brief, peppery broadsides from the back of his train against the “do-nothing Congress” controlled by the GOP that had stymied much of his domestic “Fair Deal” legislation.

During his initial difficult months taking over from FDR, Republicans had joked “To err is Truman.” Three years later, and to the end of his Presidency, they would gripe that he was hyperpartisan. 

Yet, as a student of history, he believed that the duties of his office required him to refrain from pandering to people’s worst instincts. Voters, seeing the man up front, identified with his plain speaking and unpretentious nature. 

In the crucial run-up to the election, ordinary citizens came to respect and admire this veteran politician who refused to be counted out.

To their deep subsequent regret, the one group that did not suspect Truman was shifting the electorate his way were the major pollsters, George Gallup and Elmo Roper.

Polling had advanced since 1936, they insisted, when Liberty Digest, working from an inadequate sample size, had wrongly predicted a victory for Alf Landon over FDR. (The Kansas governor lost in a landslide.) 

But, despite Truman’s gain of seven percentage points against Dewey from August to October, Gallup was so certain the President would lose that he stopped taking surveys two weeks before the election.

 As for Roper, in visiting journalism students at Columbia University, he had even “explained the infallibility of the sampling process” used for the 1948 campaign, recalled student Patricia Christiansen in a retrospective for the Fall 2008 issue of Columbia Magazine. 

All of that lulled an overconfident Dewey to conduct a platitude-laden, content-free campaign in the crucial closing weeks.

All of them were wrong—spectacularly so, to the delight of Truman, who, in the famous image accompanying this post, let them know it, in unmistakable fashion.

This Day in Presidential History (‘Old Man Eloquent’ Adams Dies in Congress, Combating Slavery)

Feb. 23, 1848—Two days after casting a loud “no” vote in the House of Representatives on a war he abominated for extending slavery, then suffering a massive stroke as colleagues watched helplessly, former President John Quincy Adams died in a private room just off the chamber where he had revived his reputation.

As he expired, the 80-year-old Adams—a son of America’s second President who had struggled to cope with high parental expectations, as well as with his own ambition, unrelenting conscience, and, very likely, a major depressive disorder—conveyed a sense that his taxing personal journey was complete. “This is the last of earth; I am content,” were his reported last words.

In the last couple of days, with the news that Jimmy Carter has gone on hospice care, many observers have noted that, whatever his failures in office, he rewrote the playbook on how post-Presidencies could be conducted.

But, with no disrespect to the ailing former President, Adams achieved a greater impact in less than half the time—a little less than 19 years after he departed the White House, versus 42 years for Carter.

That impact was achieved because, while Carter concentrated on non-governmental service, Adams was elected and reelected to the House of Representatives, a body where to this day, no other President has served after leaving the White House.

(Other ex-Presidents have been consequential after leaving the White House, but not to the extent Adams was, nor as happily. In 1875, Andrew Johnson went back to the Senate, only to die just a few months later. William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, a position he preferred immensely over the Presidency. Theodore Roosevelt was so unhappy over being out of the Oval Office that he ran for his old post in 1912 against his former friend Taft, opening up a fatal split between the conservative and progressive wings of the Republican Party.)

I believe that places can often express the essence of a historic person far more vividly than words can. In the case of Adams, two places yield special insights into his character.

One is National Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol. Before this space was converted to an area where states could honor their most significant citizens, it served as the Hall of the House of Representatives.

When I toured this room some years ago, a guide not only pointed out that Adams had his fatal collapse at his desk here, but also this was where he had rattled opponents in debate.

To be sure, much of his effectiveness derived from his careful preparation for wording speeches and figuring what was most likely to unsettle adversaries, but he was also aided by the spontaneous insights he gained from a certain spot, where a mere whisper on one side of the room could echo to where he was standing.

The second place that provides a vivid sense of Adams is Peacefield, in Quincy, Mass.—for four generations of the family that lived here from 1788 to 1927, nicknamed “The Old House,” but now run by the National Park Service. I visited there 20 years ago, but vivid memories from my day there still linger.

The globes in Peacefield’s study belonged to John Quincy—a subtle reminder of a dazzling diplomatic career in which he not only served as America’s minister to Prussia, Russia, and Great Britain, but also altered the contours of the world’s maps by negotiating Florida’s purchase from Spain while he was secretary of state.

(Indeed, back in 1981, when American Heritage surveyed historians about “The Ten Best Secretaries of State,” Adams was the first choice of 80% of the respondents. I doubt if that result would change 40 years later.)

Adams’ son Charles Francis Adams built on the property a “Stone Library” to house the more than 6,00 books that his father acquired during his lifetime.

The most dramatic items in this library, and perhaps the ones cherished most by generations of the Adams family, are a Bible and a desk. They mark a vindication of sorts for the dedicated but politically frustrated Adams.

The English Bible was presented to John Quincy by Mendi tribesmen in gratitude for his Supreme Court arguments that won freedom for the Amistad slave mutineers in 1841—an episode in American history dramatized in Steven Spielberg’s 1997 drama Amistad.

The desk symbolizes John Quincy’s service in the House of Representatives from 1830 to 1848—a tenure that served as balm to a spirit made miserable by an ineffectual single term as President and wounded by scurrilous campaign charges.

(During Adams’ failed Presidential re-election bid in 1828, Andrew Jackson’s supporters claimed that the President had pimped for the Czar while minister to Russia, and that, in an “unfair bargain,” he had appointed Henry Clay secretary of state in return for Clay’s bloc of votes in Congress in the disputed election of 1824.)

But throughout his post-Presidential career, John Quincy’s resentment was transformed into positive energy on behalf of a cause.

As the most visible surviving link to the founders of the republic as the son of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, he became the most valuable asset of the anti-slavery movement.

Leading an eight-year effort to overthrow the “gag rule” that restricted congressional debate on slavery and threatened the constitutionally guaranteed right of petition, Adams earned the nickname “Old Man Eloquent.” 

And, like freshman Congressman Abraham Lincoln, Adams had attacked the Mexican War from the outset, regarding the conflict as a pretext for adding a slave state to the Union.

Adams’ anti-slavery advocacy formed just part of his wider opposition to Jacksonian policies on the rights of non-white peoples. As President, he had called for better protection of Indian Territories. 

By 1841, having watched his successor’s “simultaneous operation of fraudulent treaties and brutal force,” he confided to his diary his sense of impotent rage over “this abomination”: “It is among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring them to judgement—but as His own time and by His own means.”

Adams was more successful during his post-Presidency in steering the nation towards another goal of his Presidency: government investment in scientific research. He was influential in seeing that the curious bequest of English scientist James Smithson—calling for “an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of Knowledge" in the United States—was carried out when Congress created the Smithsonian Institution in 1846.

And one of the late, most gratifying periods of his life came in 1843. As he journeyed west to speak at the dedication of the Cincinnati Observatory, crowds turned out in droves to see this politician who had battled so stubbornly—and often at such a steep price to his mental well-being—for the causes of a lifetime.

For all the high intelligence, integrity, and unswerving patriotism that enabled Adams and other members of his family to achieve greatness, they also suffered an unrelenting, even puritanical pursuit of perfection, overwhelming depression, and tragedy when they couldn’t measure up to the near-impossible standards they set for themselves.

“If you do not rise to the head of your country…it will be owing to your own laziness,” John Adams advised his oldest and most dutiful son. John Quincy did so, but his brothers, wilting under their father’s disapproving eye, fell victim to alcoholism and depression, as did two of his own sons nearly 30 years later.

Often cold and austere, John Quincy made his British-born wife Louisa so miserable that only with great reluctance did she abandon her White House plans for a tell-all memoir about their marriage.

Adams tortured none of his loved ones, however, worse than himself. Assessing his life to date on his 45^th birthday, he confessed to his diary:

“Two thirds of a long life are past, and I have done Nothing to distinguish it by usefulness to my Country, or to Mankind— I have always lived with I hope a suitable sense of my duties in Society, and with a sincere desire to perform them— But Passions, Indolence, weakness, and infirmity have sometimes made me swerve from my better knowledge of right, and almost constantly paralyzed my efforts of good.”

Others took a more generous view of his legacy. In an unprecedented gesture, thousands of mourners filed past his bier for two days as he lay in state in the Capitol.

Four years later, when he joined John, his mother Abigail, and wife Louisa in an enlarged family crypt, the ornate coffin prepared by Congress for him proved too large for his sarcophagus, halting the ceremony while stonemasons worked hurriedly to widen the enclosure.

The mishap aptly sums up a family that, to their despair and posterity’s favorable judgment, refused to fit into the narrow political confines of their day.

This Day in Presidential History (Birth of George Washington Adams, Byronic Scion)

Apr. 12, 1801—George Washington Adams, who, though gifted with good looks and a flair for poetry, would stagger under the weight of expectations as the son and grandson of Presidents, was born in Berlin, where his father was serving at the time as U.S. Ambassador to Prussia.

I have to chuckle every time someone brings up the misbehavior of Hunter Biden and the alleged influence exerted on his behalf by his father. Leave aside the convenient amnesia of these critics when it comes to the prior President and the personal and financial misdeeds of his three older children. The fact is that, going back to the founding of the republic, Presidential children (particularly, far more often than not, Presidential sons) have given their parents fits.

Or, as Doug Wead recalled about a 1988 study he did for George W. Bush in his history of this group, All the Presidents' Children: “Research showed that being related to a president brought more problems than opportunities. There seemed to be higher than average rates of divorce and alcoholism and even premature death. Some presidential children seemed bent on self-destruction.”

The biggest case in point: the Adams family. The trouble started with the alcoholic male in-laws of patriarch John Adams. That tendency towards substance abuse, along with a predisposition towards depression, carried over to the following three generations of this American political dynasty.

Say what you want about Hunter Biden, but the grandson of John Adams, George Washington Adams, got there first.  Traumatized by parental separation early in life? Check. A fling with the female darling of one’s brother? Check. Overshadowed not just by a powerful father but a brother of great promise? Check. A major substance abuser for much of his adult life? Check. A headache who gave his father’s political foes plenty of ammunition? Check.

Young Adams’ father, John Quincy Adams, became America’s greatest Secretary of State, then its sixth President. In his post-Presidential career, he became the most relentless congressional foe of slavery and advocate for the constitutional right of petition. But in private life, his personality—anxious, taciturn, dour, and demanding—often darkened the lives of his wife and children. 

Paul Nagel’s superb collective biography of the family was called Descent From Glory. At times, however, I thought it might be better called Descent Into Despair. George epitomized the latter title.

His birth was greeted with joy, relief—but also with trepidation. It came one month after John Adams, the first President to lose a reelection bid, left the White House peevishly rather than witness the inauguration of rival and former friend Thomas Jefferson. A child to continue the family line was seen as balm for the old man’s spirits.

The successful delivery of the baby also soothed, at least for awhile, the anxiety of John Quincy and wife Louisa Johnson Adams, who had already suffered a couple of miscarriages. The new mother and her son were each “fat and rosy,” the diplomat assured concerned relatives and friends.

That jocular tone was uncharacteristic of the ambassador. His wishes for his son were best expressed through the pillar of integrity and restraint he was named for: President Washington, who in his second term had been so impressed by his Vice President's son that he predicted John Quincy would head America’s diplomatic corps in time. “I implore the favour of Almighty God that he [George] might live and never prove unworthy of [his name],” John Quincy wrote after the birth.

It was not to be.

When John Quincy Adams was appointed America’s first envoy to Russia in 1809, he decided to take two-year-old son Charles Francis Adams with him and Louisa to St. Petersburg but to leave eight-year-old George and six-year-old John Adams II in the care of relatives in Massachusetts. The parents were gone for so long—six years—that, upon their return, they did not recognize the now teenage George.

The reports they received in the interim about George—that he was, as Nagel put it in John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life, “hyperactive, erratic, brilliant but undisciplined, effeminate, and lazy”—were not reassuring.

The diplomat father—brilliant but ultra-disciplined—had already been peppering his son with letters advising him about Bible study, good companions, and the necessity to rise before 6 am to learn Greek and Latin. Now he decided to take an even stronger hand in directing his George’s future.

Grandfather John, maybe regretting his own hectoring for driving John Quincy’s brothers Charles and Thomas towards insolvency, alcoholism and despair, delicately tried to warn his son against also exerting too tight a control over his children, writing of the grandson he wished had been named for him, “George is a treasure of diamonds. He has a genius equal to anything, but like all other genius, requires the most delicate management.”

That “genius” was manifested in an area that John Quincy wished he could have indulged more—poetry. George was so good at writing verses that when he attended Harvard, he won the prestigious Boylston Prize over a formidable competitor: Ralph Waldo Emerson.

But whatever pride John Quincy might have felt in his son’s accomplishment was lessened by his otherwise lackluster performance at a school that his father had trained, pushed, and pulled strings for him to enter. With no American until Henry Wadsworth Longfellow more than two decades later making his living solely through poetry, it was necessary that George work at another profession: the law.

Even with excellent mentors—John Quincy and Senator Daniel Webster—George showed little interest in this career, and also underperformed when he followed father and grandfather into politics. Successful races for the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Boston City Council preceded service in these bodies, where he evinced little interest in his work.

What really interested George were ladies and liquor. Like his literary hero, the Romantic poet Lord Byron, he drew women to him with his good looks. He would be deeply sorry for one of those conquests: the beautiful niece of his mother, Mary Hellen, who took up with him after playing with the affections of the youngest son, Charles Francis Adams—and who, after breaking off her engagement with George, married instead middle brother John Adams II.

From this point onward, George’s downward spiral accelerated. Mounting gambling debts increased the problems caused by lack of career success. Looking at Charles Francis, he saw a paler but unmistakable image of his father: introspective, self-critical, but high-minded and responsible enough to carve out a public niche.

Worse, love-on-the-rebound led George to impregnate the maid of the family’s Boston doctor. The threat of scandal deepened his depression.

With John Quincy having repeated his father’s Presidential electoral loss, he turned his attention again in the spring of 1829 to his oldest child, summoning George to DC to help with the family transition back to Massachusetts.

Being under the thumb of his relentlessly demanding father was more than George could bear. Before leaving for the nation’s capital, he was already confiding in associates his intention to commit suicide. Before dawn on April 30, he either jumped or fell overboard from a passenger liner in New York Harbor. It would be a month before his remains washed ashore.

In pondering in his diary the news that his son was lost, the former President momentarily deluded himself into thinking that the death had been precipitated by “the motion of the Stage and Steamboat in twenty-four hours [which] had produced a fever, with a rushing of the blood to the brain,” but what followed sounded more like soul-crushing guilt over this probable suicide:

“Blessed God! Forgive the repining of mortal flesh, at this dispensation of thy will! Forgive the wanderings of my own mind under its excruciating torture!”

Agony caused by George continued to plague the family for a few years. Charles disposed of his brother's papers, but refused to be blackmailed concerning George's illegitimate child. Two years later, the family had to suffer through the publication of a 44-page pamphlet that divulged all the secrets of the affair.

Over a century later, a more successful President, Franklin Roosevelt, surely thinking of his own children’s struggle in the public eye, observed, “One of the worst things in the world is being the child of a President. It’s a terrible life they lead.” Though a more playful and warm-hearted father than John and John Quincy Adams, even FDR could only pray that his children could survive a life disrupted by parental ambition as best as they could.

This Day in Presidential History (Jefferson Calms Tensions After Disputed Election)

Mar. 4, 1801—In the newly constructed capital of the nation he had helped bring into being, Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated as the third President of the United States—and, after a bitterly disputed election, the first to take office in a peaceful transfer of power between rival political parties.

In his own assumption of the Presidency in 1981, Ronald Reagan pointed out the remarkable nature of such an event: “In the eyes of many in the world, this every-4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.”  

That “miracle” has continued without disruption except twice since Jefferson took the oath of office:  In 1861, when Southern states seceded rather than accept their recent electoral loss to a Republican Party committed to containing slavery, and this past January 6, at the Capitol riot that interrupted the formal acknowledgement of Electoral College results, leading to five deaths.

The author of the Declaration of Independence took the oath of office after an election that threatened to tear the United States asunder before it had barely begun. With a Constitution that did not envision party tickets or even political parties, the two Democratic-Republican candidates, Jefferson and Aaron Burr, ended up with the same number of electoral votes.

In spite of the fact that it was clearly understood that Jefferson headed the ticket, the election ended up, for the first of only two times in U.S. history, in the House of Representatives, where the rival Federalist Party seriously considered electing Burr rather than the candidate they abominated, according to historian Richard Hofstadter’s The Idea of a Party System, as “an atheist, a French fanatic, a libertine, a visionary, and a political incompetent.”

Tensions were at the breaking point, with some Federalists scheming to avoid ceding the election to the Republicans at all, while the Republican governors of Virginia and Pennsylvania prepared to mobilize the state militia in case of Federalist usurpation. In the end, with the Federalists accepting the conclusion of the informal party leader, Alexander Hamilton, that even the hated Jefferson was preferable to the unprincipled and dangerous Burr, the House voted to accept the Virginian as the winner.

In his landmark History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson, Henry Adams depicts, with wonderful irony, the men around whom controversy swirled that March 4:

*a “retiring President” (his great-grandfather, John Adams) too angry to show up at the inauguration of the former friend who had defeated him in this last general election (John’s son, son John Quincy Adams, reacted similarly in 1829 when an opponent he despised, Andrew Jackson, assumed office);

*a Chief Justice (John Marshall) only appointed six weeks before but already on record as despising Jefferson;

*a Vice-President (Burr) now regarded by Jefferson and his associates as “the certain centre of corruption” for his ambiguous responses to Federalist attempts to sound him out before the recent vote in the House; and

*Jefferson himself, who, unlike later occupants of the White House, arrived with minimal ceremony: on foot, in ordinary dress, accompanied only by militia from a neighboring state and a few close political associates.

In private correspondence, among trusted confidants, Jefferson fulminated against the recent “reign of witches,” or period of political intolerance among the Federalists, and nearly two decades later he remembered the “revolution of 1800.” But publicly, in 1801, he began what has been a tradition of newly inaugurated Presidents since then: a reminder of the unity that exists among Americans despite strongly held political opinions.

Jefferson’s first inaugural address is among the most famous of all his public documents. Indeed, in a 2017 blog post, James M. Lindsay of the Council of Foreign Relations included it on a list of the seven best inaugural addresses.

Similarly to England’s theorist of conservatism, Edmund Burke, Jefferson delivered the most memorable public utterances in a voice devoid of volume or even noticeable expression. So it was with this address. Though many in his small audience that day could barely make out what he had to say, it has reverberated in all the years since, including in this appeal to bipartisan harmony:

“Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

As with all later occupants of the White House, Jefferson would encounter storms of contention. But on this occasion, he succeeded in calming an anxious nation, including through his assurance—which has gained even greater relevance in light of recent events—to preserve “absolute acquiescence in the decisions of the majority, the vital principle of republics, from which is no appeal but to force, the vital principle and immediate parent of despotism.”

This Day in Presidential History (‘Tricky Dick’ Nixon Ascends Political Ladder With Nasty Senate Win)

Nov. 7, 1950—Congressman Richard Nixon gutted out victory in his campaign for an open U.S. Senate seat in California, adding to his influence within the national Republican Party. But it came with a price that lasted till the end of his life: the “Tricky Dick” nickname bestowed by Democratic opponent Helen Gahagan Douglas.

The ambitious 37-year-old, two-term Congressman, as he had done in four prior years in public life, infuriated liberals with his take-no-prisoners campaign, which represented some of the darkest moments in the history of American politics.

But the story behind the campaign was, like Nixon himself, more interesting and more complicated than the two-dimensional version seen by Nixon’s friends and foes throughout his three-decade career.

Given the growing importance of California in national politics in the postwar era, whoever emerged as the winner in the contest was bound to become a star with the electorate. But Ms. Douglas—like Nixon, bored with life as a junior member of the House of Representatives—had already been a real star before her run for public office.

The wife of actor Melvyn Douglas, she began as a stage actress in New York, where her appearance attracted the kind of notice that most performers would kill for, from Heywood Broun: that she was "ten of the twelve most beautiful women in the world.” After an intensive period of study, she then switched to opera singing Europe. Later, she went with Melvyn out to Hollywood, finding new exposure to the public on film and radio—but not before the shock of seeing ordinary Americans struggling with the impact of the Great Depression triggered an impulse towards activism that would last through the end of her life.

Douglas’ high-profile advocacy of the New Deal made her a favorite of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who encouraged her to run for public office. On Capitol Hill starting in 1945, she found an additional mentor—and lover—in rising Texas Congressman Lyndon Johnson.

More interested in spotlighting issues than in the drudgery of committee work or ascending the long ladder of seniority in the House, the charismatic Douglas had her eyes on higher office within a few years. Her passion for liberal causes and glamour led some to see her as a potential future Vice-President. But her next objective turned out to be the Senate seat that opened when incumbent Democrat Sheridan Downey, citing ill health—and facing a primary challenge from Douglas— declined to seek reelection.

But securing that slot, in a state with districts far more conservative than the one she represented, was going to be harder for Douglas to accomplish—and even more so facing a Republican opponent like Nixon.

Unlike Douglas, Nixon had acted deferentially to party elders. The Alger Hiss case on which he built his reputation as an anti-communist was better substantiated than the endless array of reckless charges in which Senator Joseph McCarthy was already engaged. Adlai Stevenson’s later description—"McCarthy with a white collar"—was apt.

But he had also established that he was a gut-puncher who would hit below the belt in his first successful run for office right after the war ended against Jerry Voorhis. During debates, he associated the congressman—who had, six years previously, sponsored legislation requiring registration by groups controlled by foreign governments—with subversives, and not so subtly suggested the same thing by documenting Voorhis' voting record on pink paper.

Douglas made the mistake of a preemptive strike on Nixon in late June 1950, charging that he had voted with New York Congressman Vito Marcantonio, of the leftist American Labor Party, in denying aid to South Korea and cutting assistance to Europe in half. Nixon could credibly say that this claim distorted the rationale and history behind these votes, while opening Douglas up to a devastating—and far more unscrupulous—series of counterpunches by her opponent.

Taking the advice of campaign manager Murray Chotiner, Nixon popularized a nickname given Douglas by primary opponent Ralph Manchester Boddy, “Pink Lady,” and hammered home the point with “pink sheets” comparing her record with Marcantonio’s.

Hearing one stump speech by the Republican, a Douglas supporter had warned the congresswoman that he could be a “cagey” strategist, and Mrs. Roosevelt cautioned Douglas that the Pink Sheets should be rebutted strongly and immediately. But Douglas underestimated the pamphlets and their perpetrator, regarding the whole thing as “ridiculous, absolutely absurd.” She paid dearly for that.

Nixon might righteously disclaim responsibility for the excesses of some of his supporters, but he could not plausibly deny his own anti-Semitism. Nixon’s aides discovered that the half-Jewish Melvyn Douglas had changed his surname from “Hesselberg” in the late 1920s at the suggestion of a producer. On the stump, Nixon took to referring to his opponent as “Mrs. Hesselberg” before smilingly correcting his “slip.”

Unlike Hillary Clinton in her campaign against Donald Trump, Douglas could not be credibly charged as opportunistic—even Nixon biographer Conrad Black recognized her strength as “a sincere and attractive woman fighting bravely for principles most Americans would agree with if they were packaged correctly.” But she faced an even more uphill battle than Clinton would in battling gender denigration.

The dislike of her by Nixon supporters was expressed not just verbally but physically: pelting with stones, spitting, dousing with hay, splattering with raw eggs, and rock throwing by children. Reporters noted that Douglas—who, only the year before, had been praised for keeping her figure—had now taken to eating candy bars that added 10 pounds onto her frame. The same stress from the campaign led to longer speeches that strained her voice and made her sound shrill. Los Angeles Times political columnist Kyle Palmer frequently called her “emotional.” And it was all capped by the most revolting remark of Nixon’s in the entire campaign: "She's pink right down to her underwear."

Besides red-baiting and gender politics, another significant Nixon advantage lay in fundraising. Douglas’ financial reserves, garnered primarily from labor unions, could not match Nixon’s, derived mostly from large corporations and farming interests.

Other factors added to Douglas’ woes:

*Leftover bitterness from the primary: Downey and Boddy had intensely criticized Douglas, who had done little to reconcile with them afterward. The lingering resentment became manifest in September, when 64 leading Democrats endorsed Nixon over Douglas. (Other Democrats were more surreptitious, with Jack Kennedy coming to Nixon’s office with a contribution from the Massachusetts Congressman’s father, who loathed Douglas.)

*Spillover effects from national and other state races: Harry Truman, still smarting over James Roosevelt’s attempt to draft Dwight Eisenhower as a Democratic Presidential candidate in 1948, refused to stump in California when the son of Franklin and Eleanor ran for governor two years later. Douglas became collateral damage from that decision, even though the President had encouraged supporters of her primary rivals to support her in the fall.

*Press endorsements: The influential conservative Los Angeles Times did not run a single picture of Douglas throughout the campaign. Newsweek reporter Ralph de Toledano even assisted Nixon aides in crafting a speech attacking Douglas.

*The Roman Catholic Church: While Catholic union leaders largely backed Douglas, the rank and file were less inclined to do so. They may have been heavily influenced by Archbishop James Francis McIntyre’s decision to order sermons throughout the Archdiocese of Los Angeles the month before the election that, while not specifically mentioning Nixon or Douglas, preached anti-communism and communist infiltration in the government. As parishioners left Mass, Nixon campaign operatives were waiting outside, ready to distribute the anti-Douglas “pink sheets.”

*Douglas’ ineffectiveness at close range: Nixon and Douglas met twice face to face, with the Democrat battered each time. She did not reckon with her opponent’s ability not just to distort her record but to unnerve her. Once, he looked at his watch, grinning, as she arrived late for a Beverly Hills joint appearance. Another time, he announced that he had a check from “Eleanor Roosevelt,” so nettling Douglas at the suggestion that the former First Lady had donated to Nixon that she did not even recover her equilibrium when the joking Nixon explained that this “Eleanor Roosevelt” was in fact the widow of Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

*Douglas’ alienation of opposition groups: If Hillary Clinton sparked a hornet’s nest by calling Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables,” Douglas exhibited similar tone-deafness by calling Nixon’s “brownshirts.” That was not bound to endear her with conservative male voters who had fought in the war against Fascism and had their own varying reasons for supporting Nixon.

With all these factors against her, it should not have been surprising that Douglas lost by a nearly 3-2 margin to Nixon. In the wake of her loss, she decided not to seek public office again. She resumed acting and concentrated more on her family. 

Yet two decades later, Douglas had the satisfaction of living long enough to see "Don't blame me, I voted for Helen Gahagan Douglas" proliferating on California bumper sticks at the height of the Watergate scandal that drove “Tricky Dick” from public office for good.

This Day in Presidential History (Death of James Knox Polk, Effective But Divisive ‘Young Hickory’)

June 15, 1849—James Knox Polk, who dramatically expanded the size of the United States through a war of choice with Mexico that led to the catastrophic Civil War a decade later, died in Nashville, Tenn., only three months after leaving office, utterly exhausted after a single term. At 53, he lived the shortest and died the youngest of any ex-President.

The first “dark horse” Presidential candidate not known to the nation at large, Polk rose in the Tennessee politics as an admirer of Andrew Jackson, earning him the moniker “Young Hickory.” 

As President, he followed the same managerial routine and style he had maintained as a state legislator, Congressman, Speaker of the House and Governor of Tennessee: at his desk overnight into the early morning hours, disregarding ailments he had suffered since childhood, impervious to cajoling and pressure alike, finding little if any good in any Whig opponent, micromanaging his Cabinet secretaries, and taking nobody into his confidence so much as his beloved wife Sarah Childress Polk, his personal secretary, political antenna and even business partner. 

Polk might have been tapping his humorless, self-righteous, even self-aggrandizing vein when he confided to his diary in 1847: “Though I occupy a very high position, I am the hardest working man in this country”—but he wasn’t that far off. Unlike Presidents of this millennium, he not only never took vacations but rarely ventured outside Washington.

Above all, he focused on a narrow range of objectives he outlined at the start of his administration to the historian he appointed Secretary of the Navy, George Bancroft:

*re-establishing an independent treasury;

*lowering the protective tariff;

*settling the Oregon boundary question with Great Britain; and 

*acquiring California.

Polk achieved all of these. In particular, by gaining the last two, he extended the U.S. border to the Rio Grande on the South and to the Pacific in the West, enlarging the nation by one-third. 

But, though avoiding war with Britain over Oregon, he started one with Mexico, under circumstances ambiguous enough to provoke denunciations by one former President (John Quincy Adams) and two future ones (Abraham Lincoln, then a Congressman, and Ulysses S. Grant, then a soldier in the conflict).

For about a century after his death, Polk was seen as one of a number of 19^th-century non-entity Presidents lost in an era of Presidential dominance. But by the 1940s, after Justin Harvey Smith's The War With Mexico (1919) and  short but colorful summaries of his Presidency by historians such as Bernard DeVoto and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., his stock had risen sharply. 

In the early 1960s, historians polled by Schlesinger ranked Polk eighth in importance among presidents—below Theodore Roosevelt and above Harry S. Truman.

Since then, revisionist history that has taken into account the rise of the imperial Presidency and the plight of Native Americans and African-American slaves has dropped that estimate slightly, but he remains among the top-ranked occupants of the Oval Office—if not near-great, then above average. 

Yet it might be more correct to say that Polk was among the most consequential Presidents--one whose ill effects must be reckoned alongside his achievements—certainly foremost among those elected to a single term.

Historians and contemporaries who acclaimed Polk have made much of his insistence that, in keeping to his campaign pledge that he would just seek a single term, he could only make decisions without regard to politics, and that his major appointees must act likewise. 

But his major decisions, it can no longer be denied, revolved around serving the interests of the slaveowner class—a group that Polk not only represented as a government official but to which he belonged.

As a candidate in the 1844 election, Polk was a “warmhearted paternalist” who owned only a few “family” slaves, and bought others just to unite families, according to his neighbor Gideon J. Pillow. But the actual situation was considerably more complex. 

Even as President, while under national instead of regional scrutiny, Polk continued to buy slaves—but did so under an assumed name to avoid being identified. 

In addition, according to William Dusinberre’s Slavemaster President: The Double Career of James Polk:

*Polk became a planter after he already had a successful law practice, because, he was assured, a plantation would augment his wealth; 

*As absentee landlord of a plantation in Mississippi after 1838, he dismissed an overseer who did not achieve the returns he believed he should have achieved, even though the overseer was well-regarded by slaves for his comparative leniency;

*Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, that plantation averaged annual profits of about 8 percent; 

*Only one in two slaves on the Polk estate lived past age 15—a child mortality rate exceeding the national norm;

*More often than not, if a slave ran away in protest over mistreatment, only to be caught, Polk sided with his employee; and,

*By the time he left the White House, Polk owned more than 50 slaves.

Before the likes of Dusinberre researched his background more extensively, Polk was credited by historians with a degree of moderation on slavery, at least when compared with “fire-eaters” such as John C. Calhoun. (The judgment of Schlesinger, in The Age of Jackson, was typical: while the President failed to “perceive the moral irrepressibility of the slavery question,” his attitude “did not arise from any particular solicitude for slavery.”)

But, given Polk’s vested—and growing—interest in the success of the “peculiar institution,” his policies and conduct of the Presidency need to be regarded more skeptically:

*While willing to settle the Oregon boundary dispute along the 49^th parallel rather than his more belligerent followers who wanted “54-40 or Fight,” Polk wanted to negotiate with Britain in order to avoid a war with an imperial power that, only 30 years before, had burned Washington, while he could concentrate instead on Mexico, a country that could not match up logistically with the U.S. (or, as Grant wrote in his Personal Memoirs, "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation");

*Polk ordered U.S. troops under General Zachary Taylor down to the disputed Rio Grande border with Mexico in the spring of 1846, then used that country’s retaliatory attack as a pretext for launching the Mexican-American War;

*Polk disregarded the warning of Secretary of State James Buchanan—himself not in the slightest sympathetic to the anti-slavery cause—that Northern abolitionists would regard the conflict as a trumped-up means of securing more potential slave territory;

*Though saying publicly that the Missouri Compromise border between slave and free states could simply be extended to the Pacific, Polk knew that land north of that line would not lent itself to cotton cultivation and the slaves required for that in any case—and privately assured Calhoun that he’d only nominate judges who would keep the interest of slave owners in mind;

*Polk did attempt to acquire—unsuccessfully—Cuba, whose warm climate was far more congenial to the kind of crops grown on Southern plantations than, for instance, the Pacific Northwest;

*Throughout the subsequent Mexican-American War, Polk, distrustful of their political ambitions, sought to undercut the two generals who won the most significant battles in the conflict, Taylor and General Winfield Scott—and, ludicrously, sought to create a new military position—lieutenant general—and fill it with a Democrat with no significant military experience: Senator Thomas Hart Benton, a fellow Democrat;

*“Rarely has a war been so successful militarily while breeding such divisions,” wrote David Reynolds in Waking Giant: America in the Age of Lincoln—an opposition seen most dramatically in Adams’ denunciation of the war as wicked, Lincoln’s furious outcry in the House against what he saw as an unconstitutional Presidential infringement of the congressional war power, and author Henry David Thoreau’s development of the doctrine of civil disobedience against a war he saw as unjust;

*Although Polk’s reduction of the tariffs has sometimes been seen as a stimulant to American prosperity in the late 1840s and early 1850s, it sprang inevitably from the direct interest of the Southern planter class, who abominated tariffs as a hindrance to their profits.

However chagrined he might have felt over the Whig Taylor succeeding him office, Polk looked forward to retirement, moving into “Polk Place,” a new Nashville home that he and Sarah had renovated. 

But overwork had degraded his already frail physique, leaving him vulnerable during a cholera outbreak that broke out during his 28-day, his post-Presidential celebratory tour of the South. “He knew what he wanted, and got it, but it killed him,” summarized Schlesinger.

In his last will and testament, Polk requested that Sarah manumit their slaves upon her own death (though the next day, he authorized the purchase of six more slaves—again, characteristically, a task performed secretly). She discharged the slaves, but not in the manner her husband had envisioned. In 1860, sensing at least disruption of their plantation and perhaps even uncompensated emancipation, she sold the property and all the slaves with it.

Polk added more territory to the United States than any other President except Jefferson. Seen simply as a President who helped establish the U.S. as a power on the North American continent, he may have belonged on Mount Rushmore as much as Jefferson, Washington, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt.

But in the truest sense, he weakened that same power by thrusting the issue of new slave territory irrepressibly onto the American political scene, where it could not be settled short of the Civil War—which cost far more lives (620,000) than the 13,000 in “Mr. Polk’s War.”