Some presidential anecdotes
No one speaks ill of Harry Truman today, but Truman spoke ill of almost everybody. “Nixon is a shifty-eyed, goddamn liar, and the people know it,” he said, and he was right. “The general doesn’t know any more about politics than a pig knows about Sunday,” Truman said about Dwight Eisenhower, and he was wrong. “The trouble about the president is that he lies,” Truman said about Franklin Roosevelt. That was true, but that may not have been the trouble with Roosevelt…
Two years before he would become president, Theodore Roosevelt said that William McKinley “has no more backbone than a chocolate eclair.” Of Benjamin Harrison, TR said: “He is a cold-blooded, narrow-minded, prejudiced, obstinate, timid old psalm-singing Indianapolis politician.” Ulysses S. Grant once said of James Garfield: “He is not possessed of the backbone of an angleworm.”
Presidents’ predictive powers are no better than others’. “Can you imagine Jerry Ford sitting in this chair?” Nixon said, not knowing that before long millions would do just that, and with an enormous sense of relief. “This man will never be president. The people don’t like him,” Eisenhower said of Nixon. Half right. Then again, it was Nixon who said that “Reagan is not one that wears well.” Not right at all.
Good fun.