Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun (8 page)

 

Two slight scientific errors led Ronald Reagan to make a silly comment during the 1980 presidential campaign. First, he confused carbon dioxide with carbon monoxide, and second, he reversed the process of photosynthesis. Put these two errors together and we end up with plants absorbing oxygen and emitting carbon monoxide.

This is why Reagan said that trees were the biggest source of air pollution. This is also why college students at a school where he was going to give a speech put signs up on the trees along the route of his motorcade saying STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN.

 

Slogans have a long and venerable history in American political campaigns. (This
writer's personal favorite from the 19
^th
century: in Lincoln's 1864 reelection bid, referring to his height, LONG ABE LINCOLN A LITTLE LONGER.) But the automobile bumper sticker provided a new and effective method of communicating partisan notions, often in amusing ways. The first bumper stickers appeared in the 1952 campaign, which saw Republican General Dwight
D. Eisenhower pitted against Democratic Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson. General
Eisenhower's nickname, "Ike," inspired a very simple but effective bumper sticker: I LIKE IKE.
The Democrats' attempts to match this were, to say the least, uninspiring. The best they could
come up with was a grammatically preposterous sticker proclaiming I'M MADLY FOR ADLAI.

In any event, what follows are some bumper stickers from presidential elections, some funny, some stupid, some just mean:

1960: In reference to Kennedy's religion: POPE JOHN FOR PRESIDENT. ELIMINATE
THE MIDDLE MAN.

1964: ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ. A subsequent poster was seen around the country
showing a photograph of a very unhappy girl who was very, very pregnant, above the words I WENT ALL THE WAY WITH LBJ.

1964: A sticker supporting the Republican candidate Barry Goldwater: IN YOUR
HEART YOU KNOW HE'S RIGHT. A Democratic sticker in response: IN YOUR GUTS YOU
KNOW HE'S NUTS.

1968: An anti-Hubert Humphrey sticker during the Democratic primaries: DUMP THE
HUMP.

1968 and 1972: NIXON'S THE ONE. A popular sticker after Nixon's resignation amid
the Watergate scandal: THEY WERE RIGHT! NIXON
WAS
THE ONE!

1972: Democratic candidate George McGovern's nomination acceptance contained the recurring phrase, "Come home, America." Republican sticker during the campaign: GO HOME
GEORGE.

1972: A Republican sticker in reference to McGovern's supposed support of pardoning
Vietnam War draft-dodgers, abortion on demand, and a liberal stance on recreational drugs: ACID, ABORTION, AND AMNESTY:
McGOVERN
IN '72!

1976: Referring to the fact that Gerald Ford granted Richard Nixon a full pardon for any
crimes he committed during his presidency, a Democrats sticker read DON'T PARDON FORD.

1980: At the end of the 1979-1980 TV season, the final episode of the popular CBS show
Dallas
concluded with the main character, J.R. Ewing, being shot by an unidentified assailant. This led to a CBS advertising campaign over the summer with the catch phrase, "Who shot J.R.?", and a Republican bumper sticker proclaiming JIMMY CARTER SHOT J.R.

1984:
(Warning: misogynistic humor alert)
The Democrats nominated the first female vice-presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro, as Walter Mondale's running mate. It is hard to say exactly who was responsible for the bumper sticker that, referring to a popular TV show of
the late '50s and early '60s, read VOTE FOR WALLY AND THE BEAVER.

1988: can't think of one.

1992: Sarcastic Republican anti-Clinton sticker: DRAFT-DODGING PHILANDERING POT-HEADS FOR CLINTON.

1996: Democratic sticker: HILLARY'S HUSBAND FOR PRESIDENT

2000: Democratic sticker: DIDN'T VOTE FOR THE BUSH IN 1988. WON'T VOTE
FOR THE SHRUB IN 2000.

2004: Pro-Al Gore sticker during the Democratic primaries, referring to the disputed
election of 2000: RE-ELECT PRESIDENT GORE.

2008: Democratic sticker: YES WE CAN.

2010: referring to the unfortunate condition of the country: NO YOU COULDN'T.

Another sticker: DON'T BLAME ME. I VOTED FOR THE OLD WHITE GUY.

Two final comments, the first from Henry Adams, the great-grandson of John
Adams, writing in the 1870s: "Any study of the American presidency from George Washington to Ulysses Simpson Grant disproves the theory of evolution."

The second is from Mark Twain, who, surveying the dismal procession of
politicians, congressmen, senators, presidential candidates, and presidents during the Gilded Age, commented that, "The
Government of the United States was designed by geniuses to be run by idiots."

Contemplate, dear reader, the following question: which of the following people were vice-presidents of the
United States
? Elbridge Gerry, Hannibal Hamlin, Garrett Hobart, John Breckenridge, Charles Fairbanks, Schuyler Colfax, Garret Hobart, John Nance "Cactus Jack" Garner, or Alban Barkley.

Answer: all of them, which is why you have probably never heard of any of them. The vice-president (or, as our first VP named it in 1789, "His Superfluous Excellency") is only important
if the president dies, which has indeed happened eight times (Harrison, Taylor, Lincoln, Garfield,
McKinley, Harding, F. Roosevelt, Kennedy), elevating eight VPs to the presidency (Tyler, Fillmore, A. Johnson, Arthur, T. Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman, L.B. Johnson.) And four vice-presidents (Van Buren, Nixon, LBJ, and G.H. W. Bush) were actually elected president on their own. But
otherwise, the VP's only constitutional role is to preside over meetings of the Senate, in which he has no vote unless there is a tie. (And you can imagine how often
that
happens!) FDR's first VP (Cactus Jack Garner) put it this way: "The vice-presidency isn't worth a
bucket of warm piss." (The delicate and sensitive media of the age bowdlerized this into "spit.") And one journalist observed that “Being vice-president isn't exactly a crime; it's more like a disgrace, like reading other people's mail.”

 

Thomas Marshall, Woodrow Wilson's VP, used to tell this joke: There were once two brothers. One went to sea and the other became vice-president. Neither of them was ever heard from
again. The point, of course, is that the vice-presidency is usually a shortcut to obscurity. When, for example, the dynamic, reforming young governor of
New York
, Theodore Roosevelt, butted heads with the Republican political machine in his state, party leaders helped arrange his nomination for vice-president primarily as a way to get rid of him. Mark Hannah's reaction when the assassination of McKinley elevated TR to the White House has been noted above.

 

Though this is not generally known to most Americans, the Capitol building in Washington contains busts of all the vice-presidents, placed in niches in the Senate Chamber.
(The vice-president, remember, is also the presiding officer of the Senate.) When Alban Barkley, Truman's VP, saw his newly placed image, he was upset by it. "They've carved me without my glasses!"
he exclaimed. "I always wear my glasses. No one will recognize me, no one will know who I am!" His entourage was too polite and deferential to point out that, after his generation passed
away, no one would know who he had been anyway, glasses or not.

 

Upon learning of his election, our first vice-president, John Adams, lamented to his wife Abigail that, "The people, in their wisdom, have devised for me the most insignificant office that
ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." He also said (using the Latin infinitive verb forms
esse
,
to be, and
posse,
to have potential),
"In posse,
I am everything. In
esse
,
I am nothing."

 

Probably the most famous, or infamous, story about a vice-president involves
Jefferson
's first VP, Aaron Burr.

The election of 1800 yielded no winner, for no one gained a majority of votes in the
Electoral College. Jefferson received 73 votes, Burr 73 votes, and the incumbent president, John
Adams, 68. In accordance with the Constitution, it was up to the House of Representatives to
elect a president from these three men. Also in accordance with the Constitution as then written, whoever came in second would become vice-president.

Ex-Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was a New Yorker like Burr, and the
two men detested each other. Hamilton lobbied actively for the House to elect Jefferson, which it
did, and Burr thus became vice-president. Burr, angry at Hamilton, then challenged him to a duel.

The etiquette of dueling back then allowed for a peaceful resolution to the argument, if both participants desired it. The challenger presumably had at least a plausible justification for issuing the challenge, and his opponent presumably owed him at least some sort of an apology.
Thus if the person challenged wished to apologize without actually saying the words, he would
not aim at his challenger, but would intentionally and dramatically miss. (The person challenged
got the first shot, the challenger the second.)

Burr and Hamilton and their seconds met at dawn on the Palisades on the coast of New Jersey. The two contestants then retired to a nearby bluff, leaving their seconds behind. A few
moments later a shot rang out, followed shortly thereafter by a second shot, and a scream of pain.
The seconds ran to the bluff to find Burr standing, a severed tree branch beside him, while
Hamilton lay writhing in agony on the ground.

Hamilton died the next day, having said nothing about the duel, and Burr never
discussed it. But the sequence of shots and the severed branch tell the story. What had happened,
presumably, was that Hamilton had deliberately missed Burr by shooting up at a tree and severing the branch. By dueling custom, this constituted an apology. Burr apparently would not accept it, because he then took aim and shot Hamilton in the chest.

 

When Harry Truman was first elected to the Senate in 1934, he was very, very nervous
about taking his place among what he regarded as an august and magisterial fraternity of
legislators. But his qualms were put to rest when one of the senior members of the Senate took
him aside and told him, "Harry, for the next six months you're gonna wonder what the hell you're doing here. After that, you're gonna wonder what the hell the rest of us are doing here."

Truman was elected FDR's vice-president in the 1944 election, and met with the
president soon thereafter for tea in the White House garden soon thereafter. After leaving FDR, another person present at the lunch said something to the effect that the president was dying. "I
know," Truman said, "and it scares the hell out of me."

On April 12, 1945, Truman was having a drink with some friends in the Senate lounge
when an urgent message summoned him to the White House. He ran over and was greeted by Eleanor Roosevelt, who informed him that Roosevelt had died earlier that day in Warm Springs, Georgia.

Ever the solicitous gentleman, Truman asked, "Mrs. Roosevelt, is there anything I can do
for you?"

"Harry," Eleanor replied, "is there anything I can do for you? You are the one in trouble."

 

Richard Nixon was not known for his sense of humor, but he did have a few amusing moments.

When he was Eisenhower's vice-president he engaged in a series of debates, public and private, with Soviet Communist Party head Nikita Khrushchev. Nixon always researched the background of foreign leaders he was to encounter (and his book about them,
Leaders,
is still fascinating reading), so it was with interest that he learned that Khrushchev, like himself, had some childhood experience in rural life dealing pigs. Khrushchev grew up on a farm in the village of
Kalinovka
, in the indeterminate border between Russia and Ukraine, and had been a pig herder in his childhood. Nixon's father had been a grocer in Whittier, California, and as part
of the meat market side of the grocery, had raised some pigs to which young Richard had tended.

Vice-President Nixon and Communist Party Secretary Khrushchev met in the American exhibit at a trade fair in Moscow and got into a vigorous debate while standing in a facsimile of
an American kitchen. (Hence the nickname, "The kitchen debate.") At one point during the encounter, Khrushchev shouted at Nixon that his opinions were "bullshit." To which Nixon
replied, "Yeah? Well, your opinions are
pigshit
. And you and I both know that nothing smells
worse than
pigshit
!"

Khrushchev stared at Nixon in astonishment for a moment, and then burst into uproarious
laughter.

 

During the 1960 presidential campaign, VP Nixon spoke proudly about he held his own in the kitchen debate. His opponent, Senator John F. Kennedy, observed that good many married men could say the same thing.