History Buff's Guide to the Presidents (62 page)

On November 4, 1986, the Lebanese periodical
Al Shiraa
leaked the weapons-for-hostages deal, and the Iranian government confirmed the details. Nine days later, in a televised address from the Oval Office, Reagan assured the American public that no such trade had taken place but that defensive weapons and parts had been sent to the Iranians as a goodwill gesture. He added, “These modest deliveries, taken together, could easily fit into a single cargo plane.” Later that week, North began shredding documents. The shipments were far greater than Reagan had insinuated.
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Before the month was out, the White House sacked North and accepted Poindexter’s resignation. Ensuing investigations revealed at least six deliveries to Iran totaling more than two thousand shoulder-fired rockets and seventeen medium-range HAWK surface-to-air missiles. Also discovered was the transfer of millions of dollars to the Contra rebels in Central America, an organization whose members, by most definitions, were terrorists.
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Oliver North was convicted on three minor counts but did not serve time. His staunch defense of supporting the Contras made him a hero among many archconservatives. John Poindexter was found guilty of multiple felonies, including obstruction of justice and conspiracy. The charges were overturned on appeal. In 1987, Robert McFarlane attempted suicide.

In a sworn statement, Reagan insisted he was unaware of the illegal activities. A joint congressional commission found his testimony flawed but did not press charges. His approval ratings fell to 40 percent. Two years later, with the assistance of a strong economy, Reagan’s numbers were back up to 60 percent.
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In spite of all the clandestine activities, the arms-for-hostages deal secured the release of only three Americans. Not among them was CIA agent William Buckley. In 1985, he died of heart failure while undergoing torture at the hands of Hezbollah.

10
. THE LEWINSKY AFFAIR (1997)

He was forty-nine, she was twenty-two. Both craved validation, among other things. Unbeknownst to either of them, they would one day get officially probed.

Extramarital sex in the White House was nothing new. Warren Harding met Nan Britton when he was a senator and she was five years out of high school. In 1919, she gave birth to his daughter. In 1921, he became president. They continued to explore their love in various rooms in the White House until his death in 1923. Franklin Roosevelt first started sleeping with Eleanor Roosevelt’s personal secretary Lucy Page Mercer when he was deputy secretary to the navy. Mercer was with him at Warm Springs, Georgia, when he passed away in 1945. Jack Kennedy had more extramarital affairs than most presidents had state dinners, but the escapades would not become public knowledge until well after his death.
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Then there was Bill Clinton, who made a career of surviving accusations of promiscuity. Among many, one came from former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones, who filed a sexual harassment suit against the former governor.
Clinton v. Jones
reached the Supreme Court during his second term as president.

It was this case that brought up the name of Monica Lewinsky, previously an intern at the White House and later an employee at the Pentagon. Under oath during the Jones case, Clinton was asked if he ever had sexual relations with Lewinsky, to which he answered in the negative. Evidence then emerged of a certain blue dress belonging to Lewinsky that contained DNA belonging to Clinton. Further evidence indicated that he had instructed her to deny their relationship. Regardless of his marriage vows, the defendant had essentially committed perjury, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering. He was held in contempt. The Arkansas bar suspended his license. He was fined.
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Congress, then under Republican control, initiated impeachment proceedings in October 1998, culminating in a Senate trial early the next year. With arguments for and against conviction, mostly along party lines, much of Clinton’s tawdry behavior and disregard for the office became evident to the most casual observer. But nothing legally surfaced that constituted “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Right before Valentine’s Day, the Senate failed to reach a two-thirds majority needed for removal.

In short, Clinton’s worst mistake, aside from the affair, was denial. If he had studied his presidential history, he would have known that Americans do not tolerate a presidential cover-up. Whether by negligence, perjury, or plot, the obstruction of justice is generally regarded as worse than ignoring international law, inducing wars, or cooperating with countries of ill repute.

In turn, he escaped full punishment for a number of reasons—a blatantly supportive first lady, a strong economy, and a weak prosecution. In addition, four months of congressional infighting had given the public impeachment fatigue.
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During Bill Clinton’s presidency, his approval ratings were at their highest during his impeachment and trial.

It was shortly after midday, July 4, 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, when ninety-year-old John Adams began to slip in and out of consciousness. Pneumonia was about to complete the miserable work that heart disease had begun years before. Lying in bed on the second floor of the family home in Quincy, the ailing Adams struggled to breathe. His once-lucid blue eyes, murky with cataracts, slowly began to close. But his mind, the greatest part of his bald, short, portly being, was still clear.

Demonstrating his tenacious will and the wisdom to realize his time had come, Adams rallied for a moment and whispered, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.” He drifted to sleep. Shortly after 6:00 p.m., his heart finally stopped beating.

In his last declaration, John Adams was wrong. Five hundred miles to the southwest, at Monticello, the eighty-two year-old Jefferson was dead. He had passed away a few hours earlier. A painful fight with crippling rheumatism and digestive complications had finally broken the lanky planter, inventor, and writer. Only the day before, the cataleptic Jefferson awoke to ask if it was the Fourth, hoping he would reach his most cherished day. His doctor told him the moment was near. Comforted by the assurance, Jefferson fell asleep and never woke again.

And yet Adams was right in his final assessment. So long as the United States still stood, so lived Jefferson and himself and all who had laid the stones of a monument that would long endure. When dignitaries visited the aging statesman a few days before his passing so that he might write some invocation for the upcoming Independence Day celebration, the exhausted Adams subtly reminded his visitors that he had already given them independence itself. Fitting that he reserved his last words for his dear companion, for the two men together had brought forth a new nation, and their friendship faithfully represented it in innumerable ways.

They were born subjects, and proudly so, of the greatest empire the world had yet seen, connected to heaven through a king and governed on earth by a parliament of laws and men. In the course of human events, the Americans matured and labored to break the bonds of an overly possessive Mother England. After seven years, they were free and adrift.

With the common enemy of George III out of the picture, the two parties soon discovered a basic inability to work together. Though they came from the same political lineage, they were two completely different beings. One was the blustery North—cold, conceited, and puritanical, yet capable of a most revolutionary bravery. The other was the agrarian South—warm, open, and eloquent, but incapable of ridding itself of slavery.

Inherently different in temperament, they soon developed irreconcilable differences. The breaking point came in a presidential election, in 1800, as it would be in 1860, both seen as all-or-nothing referendums on which way the country would go—along the existing path of conservatism or toward a wholly new republic. The outcome was too much to bear for the defeated, causing an acrimonious separation that lasted for years.

Just as North and South took ages to reconcile, Adams and Jefferson let ten years pass before they ended their personal war. It was John who broke the silence, writing Tom in January 1812 to wish him a happy new year. The surprise correspondence heartened the Virginian, and the two soon reconnected. Still fundamentally worlds apart, the retirees sometimes wrote on completely different planes. Adams preferred ethereal topics, while Jefferson leaned toward the sciences. But they found enough common ground to forge a lasting and heartfelt bond that would endure to their very final moments.

They were preceded in death by the man who had sacrificed his last vestige of health to breathe life into the government. George Washington lived not three years into retirement. On December 14, 1799, a sudden bout of pneumonia killed him, though the bleeding and blistering his doctors performed on him did not help matters. He died and was entombed at his beloved Mount Vernon, finally achieving his own dream, not to be the head of a country but to be at home and at peace.

Now the second and third presidents were gone. For many of their fellow citizens, Adams’s and Jefferson’s departures on the Fourth of July was proof of the Republic’s blessed and unique standing among the family of nations. James Monroe’s death five years later, also on July 4, seemed to confirm the notion that nothing less than divine providence was at work.

In reality, Monroe succumbed to heart failure. Several months of choking tuberculosis had reduced him to a coughing, fragile ghost of his former self. Monroe was buried in the city where he died—New York. In 1858, he was reinterred in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia, where in 1862 former president John Tyler was laid to rest very near him, albeit under a Confederate flag as an elected member of their Congress. Attesting to the cost of that terrible epoch, eighteen thousand Confederate soldiers were buried in the same cemetery, many of whom were never identified. Their president, Jefferson Davis, former secretary of war under his close friend Franklin Pierce, is buried there as well, having died a free man after serving two years’ confinement in a fort named after James Monroe.

James Madison nearly became the fourth former president to die on the country’s birthday. Legend has it that the bedridden Madison, suffering from crippling rheumatism, was given the option of stimulants to live until the national anniversary. He declined. On June 28, 1836, his eighty-five-year-old heart went into arrest, and the last of the Revolutionaries was gone.

In their place came a new generation, mere children when the experiment began. John Quincy Adams was only eight when he watched the slaughter of Bunker Hill from a nearby ridge. Andrew Jackson was nine when the Declaration of Independence was written. At the time, Martin Van Buren was not yet born, and William Henry Harrison was three years old and living in rural Virginia. He would be the last president born a colonial.

From Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe came the descendants Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon. If the latter names ring less than regal in the contemporary ear, then what is the reason? Do they all lack the noble qualities and altruism of the original class? Have their scandals, intrigues, and egos jaded the office beyond repair?

Popular is the notion that these recent administrations have mutated into an imperial presidency, assuming rights and privileges far beyond what the Founding Fathers ever intended. George Washington led a country through its formative years without so much as a paid secretary. Now chief executives are surrounded by an undisclosed number of guards and served by hundreds of loyal assistants. They command a standing army of more than a million men and women, preside over a budget that has reached into the trillions of dollars, and possess the ability to destroy the earth many times over.

To call them imperial is grave, accusatory, and inflammatory. And it is correct—in part.

The sun no longer sets upon Old Glory. Its states and protectorates reach far into the Atlantic and Pacific. With the territories of American Samoa, Guam, parts of the Marianas, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the federal government holds more square miles of territory than any other nation in the world. Its corporations and properties span the planet. The armed forces remain in places long since mollified—Kuwait, Bosnia, South Korea, Japan, Italy, Okinawa, the Philippines, Cuba. The United States has eighteen military bases in Germany alone, despite the Cold War being over for more than twenty years.

By all intents and measures, the nation has become an empire, with one great peculiarity: “We the People” are the emperor.

In 1787, “the People” were fifty-five delegates who had gathered in the Pennsylvania State House to form a more perfect union. They created a government based on the concept of representation, but in practice the electorate was less than one-fourth of the white male population. Today the People number more than 315 million, over two-thirds of whom are guaranteed the right to register and vote in federal elections. Through freedom of speech, press, petition, and assembly, they can advance their cause to the highest office of the land. They choose from among themselves the representatives who will have the sole power of executive impeachment and the senators who advise and consent on presidential appointments. Congress alone has the power to establish and collect federal taxes, to borrow federal funds, and to declare or permit the country to enter into a state of war.

The People are the presidents themselves, chosen from among the native-born, thirty-five years old or more. If the chief executives have attained powers vastly greater than their forefathers, it is because the population has done the same. Through their unprecedented political leverage, the electorate has allowed, requested, or demanded services from its chief executives far beyond what previous generations even considered. Per capita, the current generation of Americans consumes more food and fuel than any other before it. In the last century, life expectancy has increased 50 percent among the middle and lower classes, and yet one of the key issues for the 2012 elections is universal health care. President Washington was not unique in having less than a year of formal education. Abraham Lincoln had about the same. Andrew Johnson had none at all. Today, every citizen has access to a free public education from kindergarten through high school, and the electorate demands more, including increases in federal grants for the thirteen million students attending colleges and universities.