After the end, Hoover showed the way for Bush

December 28, 2006

Herbert Hoover, White House Portrait

Herbert Hoover, White House Portrait

Herbert Hoover is one of the great foils for U.S. history courses. The Great Depression is on national standards and state standards. Images from the dramatic poverty that resulted win the rapt attention of even the most calloused, talkative high school juniors. Most video treatments leave students wondering why President Hoover wasn’t tried for crimes against humanity instead of just turned out of office.

In most courses, Hoover is left there, and the study of Franklin Roosevelt‘s event-filled twelve years in office (with four elected terms) takes over the classroom. If Hoover is mentioned again at all in the course, it would likely be for his leading humanitarian work after World War II.

But there is, hiding out in California, the Hoover Institution. Hoover’s impact today? Well, consider some recent fellows of the Hoover Institution: Condaleeza Rice, Milton Friedman, George Shultz, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Gary Becker, Diane Ravitch, Chester Finn. The Hoover Institution, “at Stanford University,” is the conservatives’ anchor in the intellectual and academic world.

Hoover’s legacy is being remade, constantly, through his post-Presidential establishment of an institution to promote principles of conservatism (and liberalism in its old, almost archaic education sense). The Hoover Institution has carried Hoover’s ideas and principles back into power.

Dallas has been wracked recently with the shenanigans and maneuvers around the work of Southern Methodist University to be named as the host for the George W. Bush Presidential Library. In a humorous headline last week the Dallas Morning News (DMN) said such a library could lead Dallas’s intellectual life in the future (the headline is different in the on-line version — whew!).

Humor aside, there is grist for good thought there. Read the rest of this entry »

2 Comments | Business Ethics, Dissent, Economics, Franklin Roosevelt, Freedom - Economic, Freedom - Political, Great Depression, Herbert Hoover, History, Politics, Presidents | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Gerald Ford: Too nice a guy

December 27, 2006

CBS Nightly News tonight featured a short snippet from a series of interviews reporter Phil Jones conducted with Gerald Ford in 1984 — interviews granted on the condition they not be shown until after Ford’s death. They talked about Ford’s first speech as president, in which he declared, “Our long, national nightmare is over.”

Ford hadn’t wanted to use that line. His speechwriter, Bob Hartman, insisted on it. It’s the line that is quoted most — but at the time it set the tone that Ford was a straight talker.

Hartman himself is 89 now. CBS tracked him down, too. His memory of Ford’s not wanting to use the phrase correlated exactly. Hartman said that Ford did not want to say anything that reflected badly on anyone, not only then, but any time. Referring to the Watergate scandals and crises as “a nightmare” could be interpreted negatively on President Nixon or any number of other people. Ultimately, Hartman’s judgment of what needed to be said prevailed.

Hartman had something else to say about Ford, which is also quotable:

Gerald Ford had only one fault.

He was too nice a guy.

Mark that one down; it should be in the next Bartlett’s, or the next Yale collection. Should be.

  • Post script: It was nice to see our old friend Phil Jones again. He was the Capitol Hill correspondent for CBS for much of my time on the Hill, a man of great patience, great insight, and solid reporting.
  • More CBS coverage: Here.

Leave a Comment » | Gerald Ford, Good Quotes, History, Politics, Presidents | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Gerald Ford, nice guy

December 26, 2006

Gerald Ford died today. He was 93, the longest-surviving ex-president.

President Gerald R. Ford and Mrs. Betty Ford walk with their daughter, Susan, and family dog, Liberty, at Camp David Aug. 7, 1976.
President Gerald R. Ford and Mrs. Betty Ford walk with their daughter, Susan, and family dog, Liberty, at Camp David Aug. 7, 1976. Photo probably by David Hume Kennerly.

When a president dies, newspapers and news magazines pull out the stops to make their coverage of the person’s life exhaustive. You’ll see a lot about Gerald Ford in the next few days.

Gerald Ford, White House portrait, by Everett Raymond Kinstler
Official White House portrait of President Gerald R. Ford, by Everett Raymond Kinstler, painted 1977.

My college internship* with the U.S. Senate took me to Washington in 1974, just after Ford had assumed the Vice Presidency under the new rules of the 25th Amendment. Ford was selected as Vice President after Spiro T. Agnew had resigned in lieu of being prosecuted for taking kickbacks from his days as governor of Maryland. Within a few months he was elevated to the presidency when Richard Nixon resigned in August 1974.

But for a few months he was President of the Senate. Starting with Spiro Agnew, vice presidents no longer spend a lot of time on Capitol Hill fulfilling their Constitutional duties as Senate leader. Hubert Humphrey had been quite active as vice president, carrying key messages from the White House to the Congress, and from Congress to the President, and pushing legislation with Lyndon Johnson, in what was surely one of the most effective legislative teams in the history of the world.

And when he was acting as President of the Senate, I first ran into Gerald Ford — literally.

I interned with the Senate Democratic Policy Committee, in the office of the late Secretary of the Senate Frank Valeo. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.) signed my credentials (we didn’t have photo I.D.s in those days), and since Mansfield had so few interns, or staffers, we, and I had the run of the Capitol (and Washington, too — with Mansfield’s signature I could get into the White House press room, which was a great place to hang out then. I also had Senate floor privileges, the value of which became clear to me only years later when I staffed for another senator. As an intern I could walk on the floor at any time, and sometimes did to watch debates. Staffers generally cannot do that at will.)

Read the rest of this entry »

8 Comments | Boy Scouts of America, Current History, Gerald Ford, Presidents, Watergate scandal | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Turning Point Presentations: Nixon’s “Checkers” speech

October 7, 2006

During one of my phase-shift transitions between universities and public schools yesterday, I caught a snippet of a commentary that I thought was on Richard Nixon’s 1952 speech that kept him on the ticket with Dwight Eisenhower. Public reaction was reported to be overwhelmingly warm, the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won the 1952 election, won again in 1956, and Nixon eventually took the presidency for his own in 1968.

Shouldn’t that speech be considered one of the greater presentations of the 20th century, at least? It probably should, especially when we consider what history might have looked like had Nixon left the ticket — no Nixon nomination in 1960 against John Kennedy, no later Nixon presidency, Nixon continuing in the Senate . . . gee, which path is more gloomy?

The Checkers speech does not wear well, I think. Reading it today, I see the origins of smear campaign tactics and diversionary tactics that mar so much of today’s election campaigns and policy discussions.

This all comes up because the transcripts of the famous 1977 interview series newsman/comedian David Frost did with Nixon is the basis for a new play in London, “Frost/Nixon” by Peter Morgan, with Frank Langella playing Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost — a play that is already being made into a movie for Universal Pictures by Academy Award winning director Ron Howard, but after a Broadway run in 2007.

Nixon’s mea culpa answer to Frost on the entirety of the Watergate scandal — “I made so many mistakes” — in the NPR piece voiced by Langella, sounded exactly like Nixon. I mistakenly thought it a recording of the Checkers speech, hearing just a snippet. The Frost/Nixon interviews would probably never have been necessary, had the Checkers speech not been a success. Surely there is a direct line from the Checkers speech to Nixon’s attempt to revive his reputation in the Frost interviews.

Watergate on Broadway, with a movie in the works, should offer good opportunities especially for high school history teachers to bring Watergate to a new generation. Too many people today fail to understand the depth of the damage done to Constitutional institutions in that crisis, and how lucky our nation was to have survived it. There are many lessons there for us in our current Constitutional crisis.

A lesson awaits, also, in the career of David Frost, who crossed from news to comedy and back. Many kids today use comedians as their chief source of political news. We should not be surprised — but let us hope that today’s comedians have as much a sense of public duty as David Frost did in 1977, even while using his public service interview to revive his own career.

Sometimes free markets work spectacularly, don’t they?

4 Comments | Ethics, Famous quotes, History, Lesson plans, Movies, Presentations, Presidents, Quotes, Turning Points, Watergate scandal | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub?

July 3, 2006

History is a study of what happened and why. Often, high school and college studies of history are ruined by rote memorization of a long list of dates with a couple of words describing an event. That is not history. Often, studies of history are ruined through unreliable sources.

H. L. Mencken, the famous newspaper columnist from Baltimore, wrote a column published December 28, 1917, about the history of the bathtub, specifically that it was rare in the U.S., and how President Millard Fillmore introduced it to the White House, thereby making bathtubs and bathing popular. The column was brilliant, and it was a complete fabrication, a hoax. Within two years, however, Mencken’s column had found its way to reference books, encyclopedias, and bad history books. Here is Mencken’s original column: “A Neglected Anniversary.”  [3/19/2009 – that link is dead; see Mencken’s column here.]  You can read a history of the hoax and its spread at this site, Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

It’s a great story, about a do-nothing president, the press, and errors of history. To know the story, dates are unimportant. No one cares what years Fillmore was actually in office, no one cares exactly when Mencken’s column was published. Knowing lists of dates has never stopped a bad historian from reciting the erroneous claim that Millard Fillmore introduced the concept of bathing in a bathtub to the White House.

But now you know better.

This site is dedicated to knowing history, especially U.S. history, better.

Thank you for visiting. Noodle around, see what articles are here, leave some comments if you care to. Especially, if you find errors, leave a note of correction.

23 Comments | Bogus history, Fillmore's bathtub, Hoaxes, Journalism, Millard Fillmore, Presidents | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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