MISSED THE BOSS? GET THE CONSIGLIERE. Hey, this is where I came in. The President is under attack. Well, not exactly the President, but one of his aides. So what else is new? When Roosevelt was president they did things the same way. I remember it well. Harry Hopkins was the fall guy then. He was the closest man to Roosevelt, so he caught all the flak. It went with the job. Ever since Harding’s day in the early Twenties every friend of the President was automatically a criminal suspect who had to be watched closely lest he walked off with the crown jewels and diverted them to his own use. It didn’t seem to matter that unlike the Brits, the U.S. didn’t have any crown jewels to enhance the glory of our rulers, there was still a distinct impression among the public that if we had, they wouldn’t have been safe for very long exposed to the notorious characters likely to be dragged into Washington by every new Administration. In Harding’s time this was not a wrong impression at all, and the recollection of his scandals carried over into the administrations that succeeded him, so that the public was prepared to think the worst of anyone who suddenly rose out of obscurity by reason of his association with a new President. That was the Harding pattern -- a crew of newcomers from Ohio moved in when he did and later on were found to have been making free with government property, pretty ladies, bootleg liquor and oil leases among other things, all of which tended to reflect on their successors as well as themselves. The Coolidge and Hoover administrations that came after Harding escaped the threat of scandal because Coolidge didn’t have any friends, and Hoover became a lame duck in less than a year due to the Depression falling in on him like a ton of bricks. The Roosevelts, however, were sociable people with lots of friends, but also lots of enemies who enjoyed picking holes in the friends’ reputations to show by proxy how unfit the Roosevelts were to occupy the throne. I remember them all. Not the people before Roosevelt, because they were before my time, but FDR I grew up with and have since survived eleven of his successors. Damn near every one of them had an Achilles heel in the shape of a trusted friend or two whom he had elevated to high office and who subsequently got into a godawful jam causing him in most cases to be run out of town by the vigilantes, leaving his friend the President to clean up the mess and try to recover the votes his protégé had lost him. Harry Truman was Roosevelt’s vice president and took office as President in 1945 when Roosevelt died suddenly. He survived the 1948 election and continued in office, but in the Harding tradition he had imported his own “Missouri gang’ into Washington and it turned out they were fixing tax cases and contracts left and right, being rewarded with minks for their ladies and money for themselves. Truman had other troubles as well, so he passed up his chance to run again in 1952 and left town under a cloud. Today he’s being whitewashed, but these are the facts. No one could have predicted that the war hero Dwight Eisenhower could ever have to worry about the same kind of thing occurring in his administration that had brought about his election in the first place. Ike arrived in office as a white knight come to clean out the Truman stables and restore honor to the Presidency. He mostly did, but even so was tripped up by the indiscretion of his chief of staff, Sherman Adams, a former governor of New Hampshire, who had formed an association with Bernard Goldfine, a businessman who had created a lot of jobs in Adams’s state. Goldfine liked to give gifts to his friends, and Adams couldn’t afford to offend him by refusing. He wound up with a vicuña coat, which he reciprocated with some jars of maple syrup -- all New Hampshire had to offer -- and was forced out of the White House for accepting gifts unlawfully. The next performer in the ring was John Kennedy, who encountered no scandals prior to his assassination. The details of his sex life came to light subsequently, but in our day it would have been contemporaneously, as in Clinton’s case, and it is interesting to speculate on how JFK would have handled it. His father’s bankroll would have been employed of course, but what might John have done if the women couldn’t be bought? As it was, John left a spotless reputation behind, which inclined people to think well of his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, in spite of his reputation for shady dealings, Lyndon had a Harry Hopkins too, whose name was Bobby Baker, who was alleged to have been Johnson’s bagman, but who took a jail term without squealing, and who was saved from further investigation by the Democrats in Congress. LBJ managed to find a completely different way to run his presidency into the ground, which of course was his Vietnam debacle. After that it was time to clean up Washington once more and Nixon took on the job. It’s hardly necessary to write any more about that here, but the case does illustrate what I’ve been saying about the role of surrogates who are there to take the wallops aimed at the president. Sometimes they’re innocent bystanders, but sometimes they’re instigators who incite attack themselves with the unconventional ways they find to carry out heir mission of supporting their president. Nixon had a whole army of these overzealous people on hand, and attempting to cover up for them to prevent embarrassment brought him to the final embarrassment, resignation. Nixon’s VP, Ford , wasn’t in office long enough for anyone to focus on the weak spots in his entourage, so he and they escaped unhurt. Jimmy Carter followed him and promised America “a government as good as its people”. Within months he was under fire and defending his Budget Director, Bert Lance, for the free-and-easy way he used to run his banking business in Georgia. Lance went and took Carter’s reputation with him. But nothing’s changed since. Reagan, coming after Carter, was attacked for the things his friends did. Bush I was an exception and escaped this. Clinton was the first president who even had to defend himself for picking the wrong wife. Bush II can’t be reached through his wife, but Carl Rove serves as scapegoat for all his sins. I’ve named others who filled this role before him. The tough part is that is that there’s no recognition given for choosing creditable associates. Henry Kissinger was the most popular appointee of a president in my time. Did Nixon ever get any credit for this? Are you kidding? Pure luck was all it was, his enemies said. You can’t win.
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