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Presidents do the wackiest things

By George Pelletier - Milford Bureau Chief | Jan 16, 2021

If you think Donald Trump is a bit on the unwonted side (he is), the U.S. has actually had a pack of presidential peculiarities that make The Donald seem, um, less unseemly.

DIAL M FOR MURDER: Richard Milhous Nixon was paranoid. You think? Tricky Dick was obsessed and incensed with D.C. columnist Jack Anderson. How bizarrely? Nixon spitballed a few ideas with aides that included slipping poison into Anderson’s medicine cabinet or exposing him to LSD by treating his steering wheel with the hallucinogenic drug. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. I don’t think Nixon’s was one of them; to quote the appropriately maligned prez: “I would have made a good pope.” Sound familiar?

PRESIDENTIAL LEAKS: Some presidents have no shame. Take LBJ, who is fabled to have often relieved himself outdoors in the House office parking lot. And if a colleague came into the bathroom as Lyndon was wrapping things up at the urinal, he’d kick off a conversation with the chap. Brazenly unapologetic, Johnson also gave interviews while going to the bathroom. Let’s just say, you’d be flush while he was flushing.

POLLY WANT A SWEAR JAR? Andrew Jackson probably couldn’t compete with LBJ’s potty mouth, but he didn’t have to. He taught his parrot, Polly, to do the cussing instead. Legend has it that the bird did everything but flip himself, and during Jackson’s funeral, the foul-mouth fowl was swearing so vociferously, it had to be removed from the premises. If only I could get my dog to do that.

MARS ATTACKS: Peanut-loving president Jimmy Carter stated while running for president that he had seen a UFO. No, he wasn’t talking about a uniformed federal officer, but rather the little green men. “I don’t laugh at people anymore when they say they’ve seen UFOs,” Carter said. “I’ve seen one myself.” And we all thought his brother Billy was the kooky Carter.

HOT IN CLEVELAND: President Grover Cleveland met his wife shortly after she was born. The daughter of a family friend, he acted as her guardian when the 11-year-old girl’s father died. The two began a romantic relationship when she was 21 years old, making her the youngest first lady in history. Cleveland was also the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms. In the words of Edmund Burke, “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” Let’s hope not.

GROVER’S OTHER HANG-UP: Literally, that’s about it. While sheriff of Erie County, New York, (pre-prez), Cleveland himself opted to hang a man convicted of killing his mother. As one paper said of the incident, “Thus it was Sheriff Cleveland, standing behind a screen some 20 feet away from the law’s victim, pushed the lever door that dropped the gallow’s trap where the man stood.” Cleveland’s wife Frances was also the first-first lady to remarry after her husband’s death. No sense hanging around.

OTHER THAN THAT, HOW WAS THE THEATER? Speaking of pre-presidential gigs, Abraham Lincoln spent time as a barkeep, opening a saloon of sorts called Berry and Lincoln, with his friend William Berry. The two opened the bar in 1833 and for just pennies, you could get sauced. Things dried up, including all the alcohol, when the boozing Berry drank all the profits.

SHOCKING BEHAVIOR: Phobia, shmobia. For president Benjamin Harrison, electricity really made him jittery. As major developments were being made in conduction, it was Benji who introduced electric lighting into the White House- but would refuse to actually touch the light switch for fear of being electrocuted. If only one of his wives had a joke joy buzzer- that would have been brilliant – and illuminating.

COOL CAT: President Calvin Coolidge had a menagerie of pets when he was in the Oval Office, ranging from Ebeneezer the donkey to Smokey the bobcat. His favorite feline friends were a pair of lion cubs, a gift from the government of South Africa. They were named Tax Reduction and Budget Bureau. Wow, those really just roll off the tongue.

LAME BRAIN: In Jan. 2018, Donald Trump took a cognitive exam, and released the results to the public in an effort to prove his intellectual prowess and fitness for the office. The problem is the “Montreal Cognitive Assessment” isn’t exactly the SATs. Sample “questions” include: Draw a cube; connect the dots; identify the animal; and “repeat the sentence.” If there is one thing that Trump may be good at post-POTUS, is repeating sentences, prison or otherwise.

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