How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country (16 page)

Johnson is the most underdoggiest underdog who has ever underdogged—which, in a fight, might hurt you. If Hollywood tells us anything, it’s that the underdog always wins. No one expected Johnson to amount to much of anything, but he gave himself an education and rose to national prominence and eventually became
president
.

Still, if real life tells us anything, it’s that the underdogs
don’t
actually win. Smack this stumpy, Charlie Brown twerp around for a while and remind him why
he
doesn’t get to write history.

Ulysses S. Grant was put on this Earth to do two things: kick ass and drink booze, and he will never run out of booze, so you can assume he’ll be sink-pissingly drunk for his bout with you. Also, saying that he was put on this Earth only to do two things isn’t an exaggeration; Grant was a failure at literally everything else he tried to do, including presidenting. He was never a great student, he was never an athlete, and didn’t have many friends. He wasn’t a terrific communicator, and as president didn’t make enough of an impact to make a dent in any historical polls.

Grant wasn’t even a solid military strategist, which is probably why he won so much. What Grant had, and what almost any great general needs, was a deep, natural, and impossible-to-quantify instinct for war. It is an unteachable skill that combines instinct with practicality and total ruthlessness, and Grant had it in spades. He never so much as picked up a book on strategy, and never made any
decisions on the battlefield based on trying to be one step ahead of the other guy; he just operated with a sort of primitive war IQ. Grant was simply surviving by fighting every single day and every single night; he was a mad fighter full of piss and vinegar and mostly whiskey.

Oh, right, the drinking. Nothing could stop Grant from drinking, not an important battle, and not even the soldier that Grant personally hired to stop him from drinking too much. Let’s take that again. Grant knew that he drank so much that he appointed
an armed soldier
specifically to make sure he didn’t drink during the war, and he still drank, and he
might have been right for doing so
. The drinking lowered Grant’s inhibitions and helped him keep his cool in any situation. Hell, even President Lincoln admitted that he wanted Grant in command of the army specifically
because
of his drinking. He was an alcoholic, but he was, according to Lincoln, exactly the kind of alcoholic that the Union needed. Lincoln’s casual acceptance of Grant’s drunkenness is the strongest 1800s version of the “he’s a loose cannon but, dammit, he gets
results
” speech that we will ever hear.

His constant drunkenness combined with his terrifying innate battle prowess made him impossibly great as a soldier and later commander of the Union Army, and by “impossibly great” I do mean that he objectively should not have been as successful as he was. He was regularly going up against generals who had more experience and skill and sobriety, and, like Washington before him, would often return from battle unscathed despite having had his horse shot out from under him, or his sword shot right out of his hand. He won because he was lucky, full of liquid courage, and stubborn. Grant admitted on more than one occasion to having an inability to turn back in battle after choosing to advance, an aversion based entirely on his own superstitions. He thought it was bad luck to retreat, so he fought and he fought and he fought and he
fought
.

But all hope is not lost, because you are holding a book about president-fighting, which—unless a book called
This Book Is Made of a Poison to Which Ulysses S. Grant Is Allergic
exists that I somehow didn’t hear about—makes mine the best book you could possibly
have in this situation. Grant drank as much as he did because he was cripplingly insecure, specifically about being naked. All of his fellow soldiers would shower outside together in the morning, and Grant was the only one who refused to be seen naked by any of his men. He would bathe himself alone in his tent, and not a single other soldier (not even his aides and helpers) was allowed to see him, perhaps because he was worried they would laugh at or say disparaging things about his genitals. John Quincy Adams swam naked every single day and
loved talking about it
, while Grant, on the other hand, steadfastly kept his genitals from everyone but his wife.

Now, this isn’t a book about presidential genitals (that will be my next book), so it’s not my place to speculate on whether or not President Ulysses S. Grant had weird balls, but I would like to float that out as a possibility before we continue. Again, it would be historically irresponsible of me to state “Grant’s balls were super-weird” as a fact, as I am not an expert on how weird Grant’s balls may or may not have been, but in the interest of thoroughness, I
would
like to leave it out here as a potentiality. Grant might have had weird balls. You can choose to ignore or exploit this when you fight him in a few hours.

It wasn’t just his comically misshapen balls that made Grant uncomfortable. For someone who made a career out of killing and helping other people kill, he was notoriously squeamish when it came to blood. He hated the sight and taste of it so much that, on the rare occasions when he did eat meat, he demanded that it be burned to a near crisp. In fact, if it hadn’t been for his magnificent beard, you might even confuse Grant with a woman. In his youth, he was small, slender, and rosy-cheeked, with a face like a little girl’s face. Some historians have described him as “feminine” and “soft,” and his fellow officers’ nickname for him up until the Mexican War was the “Little Beauty.” His light, sing-songy voice often startled people, who assumed he’d have a more commanding voice, one more appropriate for a commander.

I don’t know if you’ve settled on what kind of fight you and Grant will be having, but if you could avoid using animals at all costs, that would probably be wise. If you’ve already decided that this battle
will take place on horse- or sharkback, there’s very little this book can do for you. If not, leave the animals out, because Grant had a real soft spot for them.

Grant was rejected by both of his parents and not liked by the other people in his age group (his nickname before the “Little Beauty” was “Useless”), so he turned to animals. He rode and loved horses and spent all of his time outside, bonding with and talking to animals, the only things that couldn’t reject him or ask him why his balls were so weird. He loved animals
so
much that, when he caught a teamster
whipping a horse in the face during the Wilderness campaign, he flew into a rage, used profanity (the only time in his life he did this), and tied the man to a tree and left him there for six hours. It was the angriest anyone had ever seen Grant, and this was a man who tried to kill other men
while drunk
. If you so much as step on a spider while going toe-to-toe with Grant, you’ll unleash an inner Hulk that you don’t want to mess with. You won’t like Grant when he’s Drunk Hulk.

So, in your fight with Grant, assume he’s packed on a few extra beer muscles, the kind that dull pain and turn everyone into a good fighter. The smartest thing for you to do is draw blood (his or yours), as quickly as possible, just to get Grant good and queasy. The second-best thing you can do is get a big crowd to show up and, if you can manage, get that president naked. He will
hate
it.

Probably because his balls are so weird.