Durst Will - White House Confidential: the Little Book of Weird Presidential History

Copyright 1998, 2006, 2016 by Gregg Stebben

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Rain Saukas

Cover images: iStock

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1419-9

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1420-5

Printed in the United States

In memory of my coauthor Austin Hill:

He was a great role model and a great friend.

Austin, you are missed by all who knew you.

C ONTENTS

F OREWORD

E ducators all over America should get down on their knees and thank the maker for Gregg Stebben and Austin Hills White House Confidential . Not only have these celebrated journalists managed to make our nations rich history richer, theyve broadened our understanding of who our leaders are now and have been in the past. Turns out theyre goofy, scandal-ridden, jealous, greedy, egocentric addicts, murderers, and adulterers. Just like us. Hey everybody, these folks do represent we, the people. The system works.

The histories crammed down our throats in elementary school were dry to the point of desiccation. Think Miss Havishams wedding cake from Great Expectations , then stick it in a 300-degree oven overnight. Teachers and professors wasted the best years of their lives trying to convince us that presidents were similar to saints. Black and white. Straight and narrow. Their rise to powerthe patient result of persistence, perseverance, and perspicacity. Totally excising all their petty, perverse, and prurient peccadilloes. You know, the tasty bits. Which is what your political taste buds will encounter here.

Before White House Confidential , trying to understand the 44 POTUSes and 47 Vice POTUSes was like reading the expression on people standing on Mr. Rushmore from the parking lot of the Alamo. But now, through the magic telescope of intense inquiry, profound probity, and acute analysis, the focus has cleared and we can see the entire person: with not just warts intact, but big, stinky, strange-colored hairs growing out of those warts, often as thick as undersea transatlantic communications cables.

The subtitle may be The Little Book of Weird Presidential History , but its impact for our understanding of the characters that shaped the nation, the hemisphere, the world, the solar system, and the universe has been huuuuuuge. Mr. Stebben has provided a public service going beneath the wigs and breechcloths to dig out the calumny, opprobrium, indiscretions, and various fluids left in, on, and near White House nooks and crannies. Not to mention crooks and nannies. Suffice it to say, you do not want to use a black light on the walls of the Lincoln Bedroom.

In this book, fun facts fill every page, and what makes them even funner is that theyre all true. So if youre comfortable dazedly wandering through your dream world of imagining our nations leaders as little more than animatronic robots from Disneys Hall of Presidents, this book is probably not for you. However, if you want the dirt on the real flesh and blood people that are and were your commanders in chief, pull up a chair and dive right in. Youre about to embark upon one lively, scholarly, bipartisan, rollicking good time.

Will Durst

willdurst.com

@willdurst

I NTRODUCTION

P resident of the United States. What a rotten job.

Youre the guy or gal whos always to blame. The economy. Foreign policy. Drugs in the schools. Crime on the streets Its all your fault.

Throw in the official duties: commander in chief of the armed services and chief executive of the biggest, fattest, least efficient organization in the known world. Youve got the power to nominate your good friends A, B, and C for secretary of state, Supreme Court justice, or maybe ambassador to some country called Paradso. But youve got to do it without ticking off the general public, too many members of Congress, or your good friends X, Y, and Z (who thought they were going to get the jobs because thats what you said you were going to do). You also get the power to declare war. (Sort of.) But what if you do it and in retrospect realize you were just having a bad day? And on top of all that youve got to decide whether you should sign or veto a bunch of bills from Congressand every time you try to read one you fall fast asleep.

All of which causes you to wonder: Does anyoneother than your press secretary, a handful of bloggers and radio call-in talk show hosts, and a couple of other people with political futures at stakereally care about any of this stuff?

Somehow you get the sense that what the American public really expects from you, their president, is entertainment. Giant, screaming headlines full of corruption, scandal, sex, stupidity, sleaze. And presumably they want that sex, stupidity, and sleaze to be yours. After all, youve finally made it. Youre in the center ring. Youre president of the United Statesthe all-star attraction. And now its you everyone wants as the fall guy.

This of course means that its also your job to collaborate with the media to destroy your life, your reputation, your familyand your knees (a reference to tumbling, tumbling Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton, as well as to Thomas Jefferson, who once took a spill while showing off for his married girlfriend), all in an effort to entertain the American people.

Thus far, our legion of presidents has lived up to the challenge. And when theres been nothing true to report, the media has been only too happy to help out; in the absence of truth they report on rumor, innuendo, a thread of a thread of a story heard somehow, somewhere.

Are we, the people, really this callous? Petty? Shallow? Or easily amused? Probably not.

The truth is most of us would rather have a straight-shooting, stand-up kind of president than one whos a buffoon or a scoundrel or a cheat. In fact, what most of us really want is a president whos a hero. Or a saint. Someone with impeccable moral values and judgment. A flawless personal history. The sort of guy or gal who has never made an enemy or, barring that, the sort who has made manybut for all the right, fight-for-what-you-believe-in reasons.

Yup. This is what we desperately crave, even though its a standard we ourselves could never hope to live up to. So we take what we can get, and then we act horrified when our presidents and presidential candidates do the same dirty, rotten stuff with their lives we do with ours.

And now that youve spent the last few moments imagining the job was yours, arent you relieved to remember its a job that actually belongs to someone else?

A C OUPLE OF S MALL D ISCLAIMERS

One:

Y our authors, too, are members of the media. Therefore we want to fulfill our obligation to you, the reader, by entertaining you with stories about the presidents based either on the stupid, rotten stuff theyve actually done or at least the stupid, rotten stuff of which theyve been publically accused. However, we want to do this without creating a scandal of our own. For that reason we state up front that this work contains absolutely no groundbreaking or earth-shattering new research on the behavior of presidents past or present. Furthermore, we make absolutely no warrants toward the truth or veracity of any of the information contained in this book.