Presidential Anecdotes, 2nd Edition

One evening Calvin Coolidge took a short walk around the White House grounds with Senator Selden P. Spencer of Missouri. As they were returning, Spencer pointed to the Executive Mansion and said facetiously: "I wonder who lives there." "Nobody," said "Silent Cal" glumly. "They just come and go." Of [...]
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One evening Calvin Coolidge took a short walk around the White House grounds with Senator Selden P. Spencer of Missouri. As they were returning, Spencer pointed to the Executive Mansion and said facetiously: "I wonder who lives there." "Nobody," said "Silent Cal" glumly. "They just come and go." Of course, Coolidge exaggerated. There were never any real "nobodies" in the White House. Many of its tenants possessed talents and skills worthy of respect in any time and place. Some of its occupants, however, displayed modest abilities indeed. Take Warren Gamaliel Harding for instance. A former small-town Ohio newspaper editor, Harding thought he had a way with words. He did, but it was the wrong way. H.L. Mencken was fascinated by what he called "Gamalielese." It was, he thought, the worst English he had ever encountered. "It reminds me," he wrote, "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." Dramatic, poignant, hilarious, and sentimental: anecdotes about our presidents are as varied as the presidents themselves, and people have enjoyed hearing them since the early days of the American republic. This new and revised edition of Presidential Anecdotes recounts some of the most striking stories about America's forty-one chief executives, from Washington to Clinton, from the most famous to the least-known. Shedding light on the presidents as human beings and on the culture that produced them, this entertaining book shows what a varied lot of personalities they were--brilliant and dull, taciturn and talkative, austere and easy-going, vain and modest, generous and miserly, pompous and folksy, charming and lackluster. From the story of George Washington chopping down the cherry tree to Bill Clinton winging a speech to Congress, from Abraham Lincoln's homely tales to Ronald Reagan's one-liners, Presidential Anecdotes contains an abundance of fascinating and revealing stories about America's presidents. Arranged chronologically, the stories are based on passages appearing in autobiographies, letters, journals, and reminiscences of the presidents and their families, friends, and associates. Some of the stories are spurious, as the book makes clear, but most of them have a solid basis in fact. Boller provides a lively sketch of each president, depicting his personality, temperament, life style, and central vision, and then goes on to tell stories about them that throw further light on their characters and personalities. Taken together, Boller's essays and stories about America's Chief Executives comprise a capsule history of the presidency and a running commentary on American politics during the past two hundred years.