Scorn (14 page)

 

American Politics

The moral character of Jefferson was repulsive. Continually puffing about liberty, equality and the degrading curse of slavery he brought his own children to the hammer and made money out of his debaucheries.
Alexander Hamilton, American politician on Thomas Jefferson, third President of the USA

DEPEW: I hope if it's a girl Mr Taft will name it for his charming wife.
TAFT: If it is a girl, I shall, of course, name it for my lovely helpmate of many years. And if it is a boy, I shall claim the father's prerogative and name it Junior. But if, as I suspect, it is only a bag of wind, I shall name it Chauncey Depew.
William Howard Taft, before his election as President, and Chauncey Depew

He looked at me as if I was a side dish he hadn't ordered.
Ring Lardner Jr. on President William Howard Taft

You pride yourself upon an animal faculty, in respect of which the slave is your equal and the jackass infinitely your superior.
John Randolph to fellow-Congressman Tristram Burges, in reply to the latter's claim he was impotent

A real Centaur: part man, part horse's ass.
Dean Acheson on President Johnson

President Robbins was so well adjusted to his environment that sometimes you could not tell which was the environment and which was President Robbins.
Randall Jarrell

Why, if a man were to call my dog McKinley, and the brute failed to resent to the death the damning insult, I'd drown it.
William Cowper Brann on William McKinley

Reader, suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
Mark Twain

‘Do you pray for the senators, Dr Hale?' ‘No, I look at the senators and I pray for the country.'
Edward Everett Hale

Six inches deep – and six miles wide at the mouth.
Popular jibe comparing William Jennings Byron, American populist party's presidential candidate (known as The Boy Orator of the Platte), with the River Platte

The policeman and the trashman call me Alice. You cannot.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth, when Senator Joseph McCarthy called her Alice

The meanest kind of bawling and blowing office-holders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men, custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels well-train'd to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, dis-unionists, terrorists, mail-riflers, slave-catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President, creatures of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, spongers, ruin'd sports, expell'd gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of conceal'd weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from other people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combinings and born freedom-sellers of the earth.
Walt Whitman on a Democratic National Convention of the 1850s

A large shaggy dog, just unchained, scouring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.
Robert Louis Stevenson on Walt Whitman

A man of taste, arrived from Mars, would take one look at the convention floor and leave forever, convinced he had seen one of the drearier squats of Hell … a cigar-smoking, stale-aired, slack-jawed, butt-littered, foul, bleak, hardworking, bureaucratic death gas of language and faces … lawyers, judges, ward heelers, mafiosos, Southern goons and grandees,
grand old ladies, trade unionists and finks; of pompous words and long pauses which lie like a leaden pain over fever.
Norman Mailer on the Democratic National Convention of 1960

My dear McClellan: If you don't want to use the army I should like to borrow it for a while. Yours respectfully, A. Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln to General McClellan, accused of inactivity in the American Civil War

Filthy Story-Teller, Despot, Liar, Thief, Braggart, Buffoon, Usurper, Monster, Ignoramus Abe, Old Scoundrel, Perjurer, Robber, Swindler, Tyrant, Field-Butcher, Land-Pirate.
Harper's Weekly
on Abraham Lincoln

God damn you god damn old hellfiered god damned soul to hell god damn you and god damn your god damned family's god damned hellfiered god damned soul to hell and good damnation god damn them and god damn your god damned friends to hell.
Peter Muggins, American citizen, in a letter to President Abraham Lincoln

He is not known except as a slang-whanging stump-speaker of which all parties are ashamed.
The Albany Atlas and Argus
on the Gettysburg Address, 1863

A horrid looking wretch he is, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper, and the
night man, a creature fit evidently for petty treason, small stratagems and all sorts of spoils.
Charleston Mercury
on Lincoln 1863

Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege, which all politicians have, of being ugly.
Houston Telegraph
on Lincoln, 1863

… the small intellect, growing smaller … [the Republicans] take up a fourth-rate lecturer who cannot speak good grammar and who … delivers hackneyed, illiterate compositions.
New York Herald
on Lincoln, 1860 election

Anything more dull and commonplace it wouldn't be easy to reproduce.
The Times
on President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, 1863

His argument is as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been starved to death.
Abraham Lincoln on Stephen A. Douglas

Deformed Sir, The Ugly Club in full meeting have elected you an honorary member of the Hood-Favored Fraternity. Prince Harry was lean, Falstaff was fat. Thersites was hunchbacked, and Slowkenlengus was renowned for the eminent miscalculation which Nature had made in the length of the
nose; but it remained for you to unite all species of deformity and stand forth as The Prince of Ugly Fellows.
Anonymous letter to Abraham Lincoln

If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?
Abraham Lincoln

His speeches leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.
Senator William McAdoo on Warren Harding, US President

He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
H.L. Mencken on Warren Harding

The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.
E.E. Cummings on hearing of Warren Harding's death

He had a bungalow mind.
Woodrow Wilson on Warren G. Harding, his successor as President

He's thin, boys. He's thin as piss on a hot rock.
Senator William E. Jenner on W. Averell Harriman, Governor of New York

A Byzantine logothete.
Theodore Roosevelt on Woodrow Wilson

A taste for charming and cultivated friends and a tendency to bathe frequently causes in them the deepest suspicion.
Theodore Roosevelt on members of the ‘Free Silver' populist movement

Thomas E. Dewey is just about the nastiest little man I've ever known. He struts sitting down.
Mrs Clarence Dykstra

How can they tell?
Dorothy Parker on being told that Calvin Coolidge was dead

Democracy is that system of government under which the people, having 35,717,342 native-born adult whites to choose from, including thousands who are handsome and many of whom are wise, pick out a Coolidge to be head of state.
H.L. Mencken on Calvin Coolidge

Hoover, if elected, will do one thing that is almost
incomprehensible to the human mind: he will make a great man out of Coolidge.
Clarence Darrow during the 1928 American presidential campaign

His attachment to those of his friends whom he could make useful to himself was thoroughgoing and exemplary.
John Quincy Adams on Thomas Jefferson

That dark designing sordid ambitious vain proud arrogant and vindictive knave.
General Charles Lee on George Washington

Not worth a pitcherful of warm piss.
John Nance Garner, FDR's vice-president, on the importance of his position. The quote is often amended to ‘warm spit' and often misattributed.

All the president is is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.
Harry S. Truman

He'll sit right here and he'll say do this, do that! And nothing will happen! Poor Ike – it won't be a bit like the Army.
Harry S. Truman on Dwight D. Eisenhower

As an intellectual he bestowed upon the games of golf and bridge all the enthusiasm and perseverance that he withheld from books and ideas.
Emmet John Hughes on Dwight D. Eisenhower

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

I guess it proves that in America anyone can be President.
Gerald Ford on his appointment

When his library burned down it destroyed both books. Dole hadn't finished colouring in the second.
Jack Kemp on Bob Dole

When he was a quarterback he played without a helmet.
Dole on Kemp

Bob says he offers real leadership – he's right, backwards not forwards.
Kemp on Dole

The candidate of pain, austerity and sacrifice.
Kemp on Dole

It is the greatest honour of my life to have been asked to run by the greatest American hero.
Kemp, accepting Dole's invitation to be his vice-presidential running-mate

You don't want to get in a wrestling match with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.
Bob Dole

Always be sincere, whether you mean it or not.
Charles Percy, US Senator

Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be President but they don't want them to become politicians in the process.
John F. Kennedy

The enviably attractive nephew who sings an Irish ballad for the company and then winsomely disappears before the table-clearing and dishwashing begin.
Lyndon B. Johnson on John F. Kennedy

Lyndon acts like there was never going to be a tomorrow.
Lady Bird Johnson on her husband

Johnson's instinct for power is as primordial as a salmon's going upstream to spawn.
Theodore H. White

I'd much rather have that fellow inside my tent pissing out than outside my tent pissing in.
Lyndon B. Johnson, explaining why he retained J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI

Trust him as much as you would trust a rattlesnake with a silencer on its rattle.
Dean Acheson on J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI

The most notorious liar in America.
J. Edgar Hoover on Martin Luther King

Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree and then mount the stump to make a speech for conservation.
Adlai Stevenson on Richard Nixon. Attrib.

Richard Nixon is a no-good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and if he ever caught himself telling the truth he'd lie just to keep his hand in.
Harry S. Truman

Richard Nixon was an evil man – evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him – except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.
Hunter S. Thompson on Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon is a pubic hair in the teeth of America.
Graffiti on Richard Nixon

The Republicans are a party that says government doesn't work – and then get elected and prove it.
P.J. O'Rourke

Gerry Ford is so dumb that he can't fart and chew gum at the same time.
Lyndon B. Johnson on Gerald Ford (often misquoted)

He's so dumb he couldn't tip shit out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.
Lyndon Johnson on Gerald Ford

He looks like the guy in a science fiction movie who is the first to see the Creature.
David Frye on Gerald Ford

I love all my children, but some of them I don't like.
Lillian Carter, mother of Jimmy Carter

A triumph of the embalmer's art.
Gore Vidal on Ronald Reagan

He doesn't make snap decisions but he doesn't overthink either.
Nancy Reagan on her husband

If the President's penis is straight, it is the only thing about his administration that is.
Mark Steyn on rumours of an intimate nature concerning Bill Clinton