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Part 3: Good But Flawed...Or Just Flawed? He did it! Through the strains of Fleetwood Mac’s “(Don’t Stop) Thinkin’ About Tomorrow”, William Jefferson Clinton took the oath of office on a cold January day on the steps of the United States Capitol. Aged 46 years and 154 days, he was the third-youngest man ever elected to the office, and the first ever from the Baby Boomer generation to lead the country--the post-World War II generation of children. As he placed his hand on the Bible, raised his other towards God, and recited the words, I’m sure (although I have no proof) that Bill Clinton thought about the long, difficult path he’d traveled to get where he was--hardship and family strife in his youth, studying at Georgetown, Oxford, and Yale Law, and winning six terms--five of them consecutive--as governor of the state of Arkansas. He was a young man, but he knew he was no stranger to politics--and he came in with the most ambitious agenda for remaking the United States in decades. What he didn’t know is that the minute the “-elect” dropped off his title, he would be reminded of Harry Truman’s famous line: “Sherman was wrong. Peace is hell.” Strap yourselves in, and we’ll go through what I think are some of the most important events of the Clinton Presidency in the following pages. I want to say this in advance: I am going to miss things, and you guys are going to ask me why I missed them. My answer: feel free to add anything you think might be lacking. The Clinton years were enormously consequential for America and all contributions are welcome. The Transition  Usually I don’t talk about Presidential transitions. Wanna know why? They’re dull, boring affairs--they are three months between Election Day and Inauguration Day in which a President chooses his top staff, his Cabinet, and outlines his agenda. There is usually no meat on these bones. Bill Clinton’s transition to the Presidency is the notable exception to this rule. The trouble started on an interesting note--when Vice President-elect Al Gore found out that the West Wing offices normally occupied by the Vice President and his staff were being allocated to the new First Lady, Hillary Clinton. TV cameras that were focused on Blair House (where Bill and Hillary were staying) caught “a glimpse of the President and First Lady screaming at each other.” The FBI agents monitoring security at Blair House were shocked. “A shocked park police guard reported later that Clinton had referred to his wife as a ‘loving bitch’,” Hillary’s biographer Joyce Milton recalled, “while she came charging out the front door calling him a ‘stupid motherfucker’.” I...I don’t even know what to make of that. Rumor was, anyway, that Gore had threatened to resign if Hillary didn’t back off--something Bill imparted to her. Gore was bluffing, of course, but that’s not the lesson you should take from this story. What you need to understand is that this was part of Hillary’s gambit to become a more proactive First Lady than the role usually demanded, and some Washington columnists feared she might be overplaying her hand. “Those who have known Hillary for years say that she has always used ‘we’, that the Clintons have always operated as a team. But Little Rock is not Washington. ‘We’ is the kiss of death in Washington,” columnist Sally Quinn wrote. Recalling that Rosalynn Carter had drawn a great deal of criticism for going to Cabinet meetings, Quinn advocated that Hillary search outside government for something in the field of child welfare, health, and education. As you all know, this is and was not Hillary’s way. She was an assertive, 21st century woman in the 20th century, but her machinations had a darker side to them. Per biographer Nigel Hamilton: quote:By saving her husband during the controversy over his relationship with Gennifer Flowers, Hillary had persuaded herself that Bill owed her one. "It always starts when Hillary has to rescue her husband from sexual accusations. But, after the rescue, Hillary assumes greater power over the rest of her husband's career than she should. Like the Russians," he noted, "she gets rid of the Germans for you, but then she sticks around." Now, full disclosure: that quote is from Dick Morris, and he’s a Clinton-hating sack of poo poo now. Take it as you will. Hillary had, however, cemented her reputation in the minds of everyone involved in the transition at this point, right up to the point where she refused to stand on a small footstool the inauguration committee had placed next to Bill for her to stand on and hold the Bible. “She’s a pill,” was the underlying sentiment. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know if I agree or not. Much of what made 1992 Hillary a “pill” was simply her being a strong woman in a Washington that wasn’t prepared for her, but her tendency to circle the wagons and punch left whenever she sensed danger in 2008 and 2016 made me believe that some of the criticisms had merit. I should not that the inauguration was pretty cool. At the Arkansas Ball in the Washington Convention Center, Bill Clinton picked up Ben E. King’s tenor saxophone and played “Your Momma Don’t Dance.” In the Armory, at another ball, he played “Night Train”. I took up the saxophone because of Bill Clinton when I was nine years old, incidentally--I thought it was cool. I was a very impressionable child.  What the public didn’t know about the transition was that it was quickly becoming a disaster. Some of Clinton’s staff, including Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, confessed to being totally exhausted. “I mean, I was so used to losing campaigns at this point, that I felt like ‘Where’s my vacation to the Bahamas?’” she recalled thinking later. Ironically, this is probably what Clinton should have done. Former San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros recalled that Clinton had joined him on the plane in Texas, flown to Dallas at midnight, then to Albuquerque at 2am, then to Denver five hours later, then at last to Little Rock at 9am. “He just went all night!” Cisneros remembered. When he saw Clinton the next morning, however, he was appalled. The normally-youthful face was drawn and haggard, his cheeks were sunken and he had dark circles under his eyes. What Bill Clinton should have done in this moment was delegate--he had a man on staff who, much like James Baker had done for George H.W. Bush, could have whipped the transition team into a well-oiled machine.  Michael “Mickey” Kantor was Clinton’s victorious campaign chairman. He was a “fighter”, coworkers remembered, a nose-to-the-grindstone executive who was used to giving orders and having people listen. He “never stopped pushing...just upsets people,” Cisneros recalled. This, incidentally, is why Bill Clinton made the fatal mistake of chairing the first meeting of the transition team--with Hillary in tow. Long story short? Bill was exhausted, and Kantor began immediately laying out a strict timetable. Henry Cisneros tells the story better than I can: quote:Mickey was pushing for decisions by the end of the week. This was Wednesday after the election, which had taken place on the Tuesday. Hillary was in the room. And it was like, 'You've got to name the secretary of state by the end of the week or—.' You know, it had to be done on Mickey's timetable. And the president-elect was exhausted. He had no voice. His posture was slumped in the chair—he might as well have been sleeping for the way his body looked. . .. But that was a Bill Clinton trait: to push himself to the point of exhaustion and beyond. And he did things in that campaign that nobody had ever done before. More cities in a single day. . .and Hillary leveled that cold stare that she can, and her face was firm. She said to Mickey: 'Don't do that! You're not going to push him! Look how exhausted he is! We are not going to be pushed. So back off!'" It stymied Kantor as the emerging leader of the transition team and turned it into a cacophony of voices--everyone had their own opinion. In the room was attorney Warren Christopher, the man who had led Bill Clinton’s hunt for a Vice Presidential candidate earlier in the summer, and he said something I thought was interesting: “The confetti still lay in the streets of Little Rock when the jockeying for position among Clinton’s hard-charging campaign aides began.” The clean transition plan laid out by Kantor fell apart. Clinton wasn’t buying. As biographer Dan Balz says, Clinton’s reasoning wasn’t exactly sound, either: quote:It was all too tidy for a man who likes to mull his options and make his own decisions. He was in no rush, Clinton told the transition advisers, to do anything until he felt more rested. Whether the advisers realized it or not, that was a signal that Kantor's appointment was in big trouble, ambushed by an angry campaign team who had never worked well with him." Clinton further complicated matters by bringing in an old friend from Hope: Mack McLarty. McLarty was a friend, to be sure--but he was not equipped to do the job the Clintons were asking him to do on the transition team. Largely due to McLarty’s presence, Clinton declined to name Kantor the official head of the transition team, creating further confusion as to who was actually running things. The result was an ominous silence from the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock as Clinton failed to announce key staff to the press. Aides such as communications director George Stephanopoulos and combative strategist James Carville saw their chance to impose their will and tried to push their way to the front of the pack. The in-fighting grew more and more savage, and Bill Clinton grew more bewildered and uncertain. His indecisiveness was proving to be one hell of a burden. The final dagger in the heart for the hopes of an orderly transition was the campaign team cutting Kantor’s legs out from under him, spreading rumors and badmouthing Kantor to Clinton’s face. Kantor had had enough. Angry and hurt, he quit. Webb Hubbell, Hillary’s Rose Law Firm colleague and Bill Clinton’s golfing partner, recalled, “Since 1987 he had worked diligently to get Bill Clinton elected President. Now, the day after Mickey achieved that goal, he was forced out.” Clinton instead turned to the soft-spoken lawyer who had brought Al Gore to him: Warren Christopher. Nigel Hamilton sums up the problems much better than me, once again. quote:Warren Christopher was charged with helping the president-elect choose only a cabinet and sub-cabinet. Why was it more important for the president to personally select the first black to be secretary of agriculture—Congressman Mike Espy—than a transition director or a chief of staff? observers wondered. Because there was no White House staff appointed, and no one with real experience of transition to advise the president-elect, there arose a sense that the new president was making it up as he went along—anxious not to commit mistakes or appear amateur, yet without any real notion of the importance of strong management in sending the right signals to those who would make or break the looming presidency. Clinton’s exhaustion rendered him blind to the failings of his transition team, and the result was the most disorderly Presidential transition since, maybe, the Civil War. Congressman Leon Panetta (D-CA) was very sanguine about the difficulties the transition team faced. quote:
It was some seriously Bambi-esque naivete on Bill Clinton’s part, and unfortunately it was just the beginning. The Strange Case of Vince Foster  You recall, of course, the tale of the well-to-do young boy that Bill Clinton befriended back in Hope--who used to play with him in the backyard despite the fact that they were of two different social classes. That boy grew up to be the number two man on the White House legal team, Vince Foster. Foster was a brilliant lawyer. After graduating first in his class at the University of Arkansas Law School, he had married and had three children. Friends and coworkers described him as “upright and honest to a fault”, but the job he held in the White House was one of the most precarious and most sensitive of all: he was Bill and Hillary Clinton’s personal financial lawyer. As such, he kept all their records safely locked in his office and away from prying eyes. What no one knew about him, unfortunately, was that Foster had been seeking psychiatric help due to a recurring bout with depression--clinical depression that was aggravated badly after the White House travel scandal. For those of you who don’t know, this was a minor flap in which Hillary Clinton fired the entire seven-person White House travel staff. She and Foster had done so due to what they charged as “gross financial mismanagement”. Unfortunately, this was done after a hasty, incomplete KPMG audit, and their replacements were a team of people headed up by a cousin of Bill’s. The whole thing smacked of nepotism and Hillary was lambasted in the press for having extraordinarily bad timing and an utter lack of political savoir-faire--she did this while her husband’s economic bill was trying to navigate Congress. Anyway, this thing had weighed heavily on Foster--and Hillary snapping “Fix it, Vince!” at him when the Wall Street Journal raised accusations of cronyism in the White House did not help his stress levels. When the specter of Senate hearings into the matter were raised, Foster’s worries were amped to the point of paranoia, as assistant Attorney General Webb Hubbell remembered. “He was certain that they would use the hearings as a way to ask questions about Hillary,” Hubbell said to biographer Nigel Hamilton. “‘Webb, they can destroy anybody if they want to--no matter how good a person you are. It can be vicious’,” Hubbell recalls Foster saying to him, plaintively. On the afternoon of July 20, 1993, Foster ate lunch at his desk in his office--a hamburger one of his colleagues brought him--and abruptly got up and left the White House. He did not return. No one questioned his absence until 6pm that evening when a body was discovered after an anonymous tip in a small park not far from where Foster lived. Vince Foster had driven out to Fort Marcy Park and shot himself to death with an old revolver. His body was found near the display of Civil War-era cannons. At the time, Clinton was in the Rose Garden, announcing Louis Freeh as the new director of the FBI. Chief of Staff Mack McLarty was the unfortunate soul who broke the news to Bill Clinton. Leading the President from the library up to the residence, McLarty informed him that the police had found Foster’s body. “Hillary called me from Little Rock. She already knew and was crying,” Clinton recalled. What happened next is the reason why Republicans have turned this horrible tragedy into a massive conspiracy. While Bill was getting into a car to travel to Foster’s house and console his family, Hillary was making frantic phone calls to the White House to her assistant, Maggie Williams, and the White House Counsel, Bernie Nussbaum...instructing her staff to remove all private and sensitive files from Foster’s office before the FBI and Park Police locked it. Now, since you and I are not paint-drinking conspiracy theorists, we know why she did this--it would have been the perfect opportunity for Clinton-haters to get ahold of some very sensitive information via friends in the FBI. But between Dee Dee Myers’ inability to answer questions about why Foster might have taken his life to the White House Press Corps and Hillary’s mad dash to extract financial records from Foster’s office hours after his death, coupled with the FBI’s failure to find Foster’s suicide note in his briefcase in his White House office, it gave rise to a massive amount of speculation. It showed a pattern of concealment that was most likely benign--but it led to suspicion. As Hamilton puts it: quote:Was the secret removal of files from the dead man's office by Hillary's staff, in the hours after Foster's death, evidence of mere bungling—or something more sinister? Tongues quickly wagged—and in the end, a Park Police investigation, a Justice Department investigation by special counsel Robert Fiske, and, later, a Senate Banking Committee investigation would all be called for, and carried out—but with no indication of foul play. Even a private investigation by liberal criminal reporter Dan Moldea, sponsored by a right-wing publisher, turned up nothing save the sad reality of self-extermination. Vince Foster was a depressed man who committed suicide. It was tremendously sad, but unfortunately for the right wing, the Clintons did not kill him. But Hillary Clinton never learned the one lesson she needed to learn: that concealment and circling the wagons will always, ALWAYS lead to suspicion and fear and conspiracy-mongering. Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell  The controversy is already pretty well known to all of you, but what you might not know is that this rather distasteful policy came from a rash campaign promise Bill Clinton had made: he pledged that on day one of his administration, he would sign an executive order that would lift the ban on gay and lesbian people serving in the military. Understand: this was 1993, not 2008 and certainly not 2019. Support for LGBT anything was thought of as nothing less than political suicide if you were running for national office. So journalists were left to wonder: why the haste of an executive order rather than commissioning a Pentagon study first? New Office of Management and Budget Director Leon Panetta was skeptical too. “Anyone with an ounce of experience in Washington knew that you certainly don’t want to take on the gays in the military issue as one of the first ones after going into office,” he said. Another aide was just as skeptical in his recollections. quote:It totally threw [the momentum] off. If you're trying to keep a rhythm and a tempo, it totally threw it off. There's no doubt about it. And it was costly. Not surprising, given that the aide in question was a young man named Rahm Emanuel. Others in the administration were less tentative. Harry Truman, they argued, had desegregated the armed forces in 1948 with the stroke of a pen. It had been a defining, pioneering act in civil rights history, and Bill Clinton was perfectly within his rights to follow suit with allowing gay people to serve openly. The problem, of course, was that Clinton was not Harry Truman. He lacked Truman’s decisiveness. For the record, Vice President Gore was fully on board. He urged Clinton to do it and be firm on it--to make the military recognize that it was subordinate in American democracy, not the arbiter of social policy. Gay people already served honorably, Gore argued, but they were not allowed to openly acknowledge--or make others openly acknowledge--their sexuality. When Clinton confessed that he was afraid Congress would overrule an executive order, Gore urged him to call their bluff. A bill of this nature would take time to organize, Gore said. Plus, public opinion might not be in favor of Congress smacking around the President on military matters at a time when peace, not war, was the order of the day for the United States military. Doing what was right, Gore said, would allow the administration to occupy the moral high ground at the end of the day. This has been my “Why Al Gore Was A Really Good Dude” for the day. Well, there were meetings. Lots of them. One of them was on January 25, 1993, in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan remembers. quote:He was sick. He had a bad cold. That was apparent, that he was sick. It was late in the day, around four o'clock in the afternoon. He had told us, through Colin Powell [the chairman of the Joint Chiefs], at a meeting during the transition, that before he did anything on this issue he would meet with the chiefs. Well, that morning we woke up and we read the newspaper and it was announced by Congressman Barney Frank at a gathering that the president was about to sign an executive order, similar to what Harry Truman signed on blacks in the military—and that would be the end of it. So we felt as a group, if he did elect to do that, that we would at least have to have the benefit of being able to say, 'I told the president how I felt about it and what my recommendation was!' Unless I did that, I would be seen as a less than viable leader. So one thing led to another, and we went over to the White House. Each of us spoke. Each of us. He listened. National Security Advisor Tony Lake was decidedly not on board with the issue being on his plate at this moment, not when the administration was trying to get an aggressive domestic agenda off the ground. “I did not welcome it as an issue,” he recalled ten years later. “When you’re trying to deal with Bosnia and a lot of issues...you don’t need this. Secondly, in terms of Clinton’s personal relationship with the Chiefs, it certainly made it very difficult.” Sick, pale, and downcast though he was, Clinton recalled trying to raise a very salient point. quote:When I raised the fact that it apparently had cost the military $500 million to kick seventeen thousand homosexuals out of the service in the previous decade, despite a government report saying there was no reason to believe they could not serve effectively, the chiefs replied that it was worth it to preserve unit cohesion and morale. The President caved. He’d never served in the military and knew nothing about unit cohesion and morale, and thus was not educated enough on the matter to tell the Chiefs they were full of crap (which they were). It was then that Colin Powell spoke up. “Mr. President, what if we just don’t ask ‘em at the recruiting station, and we just don’t know?” Clinton was sick, tired, and badly burned on the issue--and he gave in. “OK. That’s fine. Well, then, let’s study it,” he directed new Defense Secretary Les Aspin. It was a crushing defeat for a new President. Instead of emerging as a determined, honorable chief executive who knew his own mind and was willing to use executive action to offer aid to a protected class, Clinton had made the motions and then turned tail and run when it got too hard. As Hamilton writes: quote:He was, the chiefs now knew, not only a Vietnam draft-avoider, but battle-shy: a commander in chief of little mettle, though very personable and intelligent. His nominee for defense secretary, Les Aspin, was equally smart but weak: a former congressman known for his long-windedness and conference style, not clarity of command leadership. Not only that, the administration now had to go out and tell the press and the gay community that they had caved. “It was like Inchon,” George Stephanopoulos, the communications director, remembered. They’d have to retreat, while simultaneously finding words to gloss over the fact that they retreated. It was not a proud moment for the Clinton administration--and it led to the Hill tightening their sphincters. They didn’t know what was coming now. How Not To Make Health Care Policy And Influence People  I’ve already mentioned that the Clinton domestic agenda was very, very ambitious--and initially, the first priority that the new administration wanted to tackle was deficit reduction. At the first Camp David Weekend, on January 28, 1993, Fed chair Alan Greenspan warned of “financial catastrophe” unless Clinton implemented a full-scale deficit reduction plan. I know that most of you are reading this and gagging on bile right now, but I would please, please ask you to keep reading. Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen was all for it. He’d been on board ever since Clinton had promised to make deficit reduction a priority and appointed him to the Treasury Department to implement it. He had no reason to doubt Clinton would do it--after all, hadn’t they agreed at the January 7 meeting in Little Rock? Social policy guru Robert Reich didn’t think so. Bill’s old friend from Oxford already viewed Bentsen’s appointment as a betrayal of several campaign promises, but now he saw Clinton moving to shelve the same economic agenda that both Reagan and Bush had ignored for twelve combined years. Bentsen had overplayed his hand, as it turned out. Deficit reduction didn’t carry nearly as much support as he thought it did. The Camp David meeting, intended to be a “bonding event”, instead fractured Democrats further. The party was angry--they felt Clinton had betrayed the promises he’d made in Putting People First, the book his campaign had written outlining the philosophy behind the 1992 campaign. Reich had powerful allies, too--aides Mandy Grunwald, Stan Greenberg, and Paul Begala all told the First Lady that Clinton looked more and more like a Republican every day. To this day, historians and biographers don’t have a great handle on what made Bill Clinton do what he did next. Deficit reduction was--and would continue to be--the name of the game. On January 25, however, Clinton announced that his wife, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, would lead a task force of six Cabinet secretaries and a handful of senior advisors in tackling a massive, unprecedented national health care overhaul. The plan was to submit a finished proposal within a matter of months that would cover the 37 million Americans that were currently uninsured and bring down skyrocketing health care costs, which at the time had doubled in the last five years and were rising at four times the rate of inflation. Yeesh. Why Hillary? That was the question on everyone’s lips. Nigel Hamilton elaborates: quote:Were there no other, more experienced national figures who could lead the search for a workable solution? Unfortunately, Al Gore had turned down the appointment, and Senator George Mitchell, in a moment of unusual obtuseness, had advised against the appointment of a U.S. senator, such as John D. Rockefeller of West Virginia, to take the job. Nor had anyone advanced the cause of the outgoing, highly respected surgeon general, Dr. C. Everett Koop. It now meant that Hillary Clinton had to take on what House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-MO) was calling “the toughest bill since the Social Security Act of 1936”. Warning klaxons were already blaring on the Hill. Hillary recalled that Hill lifers were already panicking--telling her that the timetable the administration had set was unrealistic, and that they would need four to five years to get a package through Congress that would be acceptable. Her deputy, Presidential health care adviser Ira Magaziner, was the unlucky messenger of this news. He was, subsequently, subjected to one of Bill Clinton’s famous outbursts. Poor bastard. I should point out that no one thought of a health care initiative as quixotic. They didn’t do this on a whim--it had polled really well in the last months of the campaign, and I mentioned that health care costs were spiraling out of control. There was no question that action was needed. And Hillary had been responsible for the massive overhaul in the Arkansas public education system, so it wasn’t a massive stretch to think that she might be able to corral the myriad of elements necessary in this endeavor. The problem was, of course, the unique position she held in her husband’s esteem. “How does the HHS Secretary or a budget director tell a President that his wife’s idea is half-baked?” said Gary Bauer, a former domestic policy advisor under Reagan. Sheila Tate, spokesperson for Nancy Reagan, was of a similar mind. “It creates enormous accountability issues,” she said. Well, even if you consider the source, you have to admit that they were correct. Cabinet secretaries couldn’t talk to the President or First Lady the way they’d talk to a senator or fellow Cabinet official. So when Bill Clinton went before a joint session of Congress on September 22, 1993 to outline the proposals drafted by Hillary’s task force, he was faced with an unenviable job. As Hamilton puts it: quote:the president was attempting to paper over an appallingly complicated, rushed, divisive, and unappealing proposal with fine words that sounded unconvincing, unfortunately, and were now, at the eleventh hour, even more rushed than the proposal itself. So picture that if you will. As if the endeavor itself was cursed by a higher power, communications director George Stephanopoulos was standing off to the side as Bill Clinton whispered something into Vice President Gore’s ear. Gore motioned frantically at Stephanopoulos, who, by this time, wasn’t on the best of terms with Gore. He didn’t move. He thought Gore was trying to embarrass him by getting him into the camera shot. Finally, he went up there, Gore whispered something into his ear and all the color drained from Stephanopoulos’ face. Clinton had noticed something awry with the TelePrompter--the wrong speech had been loaded into it! Quickly, Stephanopoulos ran to aide David Dreyer, who left the House chamber, sent a security officer to the majority leader’s office to fetch his laptop, took it to the prompter’s control room, and hastily loaded the correct speech into the prompter after making a few quick final edits that Clinton had added in the limo on the way over to the Hill. The crazy thing? No one in the House even noticed--Clinton had had to riff for seven minutes, but he kept it together as he outlined the condition of health care in America and the perceived benefits of Hillary’s plan. He then held up a mock plastic insurance card--the card that, if the bill passed, all Americans would be entitled to carry. Clinton did a hell of a job selling the plan. Even the most skeptical of observers began to feel like the bill might have a chance. “Even if the first Democrat in the White House in twelve years achieved nothing else, his Presidency would be a success...success could usher in a post-Cold War generation of Democratic power focusing on America’s domestic problems, matching the quarter-century of Republican dominance between 1968 and 1992.” But the problems still existed. Here’s Nigel Hamilton again: quote:With the stakes so high, then, why was the president, with his already legendary political antennae, so deaf to warning signals coming out of Congress and the states? Why, as he had in his launching of NAFTA, had he not tried to line up former Republican presidents to back a bipartisan approach to health care reform? I’m not sure what value this would have had. We needed a radical overhaul of health care that I don’t think he could have gotten the Republican Party on board with, but then again--if the Clinton plan passes, what does the Obama plan in 2009 look like? The plan was ambitious for a mid-90s audience. 80% of coverage would be paid for by employers, and employee contributions would be capped at 4% of annual pay. This would be augmented by an additional 75-cent tax on tobacco products. Clinton banged the podium as he made his case. quote:"Let me just make clear to you the central element of this plan that is most important to me. It guarantees every American a comprehensive package of health benefits that are always there and that can never be taken away. That is the most important thing. That is the bill I want to sign. That is my bottom line. I will not support or sign a bill that does not meet that criteria." Universal coverage. Every American would be covered. It was groundbreaking. It was mind-boggling. It was revolutionary. And it also locked Bill Clinton into a possible veto of anything less revolutionary. At $331 billion in total cost, it looked like a tremendous pill for Congress to swallow. It would require both the legislature and the public to believe that America’s economic ills--which included the increase in health care costs from 7 to 14% over the last 25 years--could be solved by the plan that had come out of Hillary Clinton’s commission. But, people wondered, did this justify creating a massive government bureaucracy? Wait! Don’t stop reading! Yes, I know the answer for most of my readers is a resounding “Uh...YES?!?!?!?!” The specter of such a gigantic government intrusion into the health care system sent both Republicans and an alarming number of Democrats scampering for the hills. Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-KS) warned that “turning over one-seventh of our economy to the government is an idea that has many Americans--Republicans and Democrats--very concerned.” House Minority Leader Robert Michel (R-IL), normally a very mild and thoughtful personality, confessed to having “substantive and profound policy differences” with the Clintons on the issue. quote:The debate that begins now will be about nothing less than conflicting visions of what America means—not just about health care reform itself, but about the role of government in our society...whether our health system is essentially to retain its private sector character...or embark on an uncharted course of government-run medicine. Now, in 2019, you and I both know this is grade-A horseshit. It’s a scare tactic that Republicans have used ever since the New Deal was a thing because they knew that programs such as this would become pillars of American society and lock them out of power for a generation. But in 1993, it resonated. Bigly. People were uncomfortable with what the Clinton plan would mean for them--and the Republicans seized on this with a series of television ads featuring two personalities: “Harry and Louise”. Apologies for the crappy blurry video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buFi54TEL1E These fear-mongering ads were designed by the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA). Its president, former Congressman Bill Gradison, had felt slighted by Hillary’s failure to consult him when drawing up the task force’s proposal. When her attacks on the insurance industry got more strident--“We’re going to crack down on profiteers who make a killing off the current system,” read one of the attack memos sent to Democratic members of Congress--the HIAA was incensed and dumped two million dollars into the “Harry and Louise” campaign, featuring what I can only believe are two low-info Midwestern voters telling lies about what was now being called “HillaryCare”. Stung by the backlash, Hillary reacted badly. Though she was begged by her advisors not to retaliate, she went before the American Academy of Pediatricians in November 1993 and opened up with both barrels. The speech was a PR disaster, and the damage it did would prove completely irreparable. Hillary accused insurance companies of enjoying the fact that they could exclude more people from coverage because it meant more money for them. The fact that it was true seemed to be irrelevant, mostly because it was the manner in which she delivered the accusation--and she made a tactical error in admitting that the White House’s plan would cause nearly 40% of Americans to pay more for health insurance. Of that 40%, of course, 25% were gaining better coverage and the other 15% were “the cherries that insurance companies love to pick”--patients with no risk. It torpedoed the plan. Voters began increasingly to turn against it, and when asked why, they pointed to Hillary Clinton as their answer. And yet, as Nigel Hamilton puts it: quote:...with her own offices in the West Wing, and in the East Wing, and in the Old Executive Office Building—not to speak of the marital bedroom on the second floor of the president's private quarters—Hillary's Four-Power complex had become greater than that of the president of the United States himself over the health care issue. No one dared contradict her. Ira Magaziner was near to breakdown, but Hillary's feminist cohort continued to worship her...Faced with such a challenge to the first lady's courage and determination, her courtiers therefore dared not tell her the bitter truth, lest they undermine her incredible act of will. Clinton, for his part, believed that the opponents of health care reform had moved “to a position of total opposition”--and yet he refused to see it for what it was, a response to Hillary herself. Constituents contacted their representatives--and Democrats dove off the sinking ship in droves. As the plan lost votes, opposition grew louder and louder--and the HIAA budgeted more money in opposition to it. More Harry and Louise ads appeared on television. Funding flooded in--the budget increased from $2 million to nearly $10 million. Soon, health care conventions were selling t-shirts with “Doctor Feelgood: Her Prescription Could Kill You” on them. Needless to say, the health care initiative died--not with a bang, but with a whimper--and it was one of the main drivers of the crushing Republican victories in the 1994 midterm elections. Democrats lost both houses of Congress: eight (!) seats in the Senate and 54 (!!!!!!!) seats in the House of Representatives. Bill Clinton had made the mistake of appointing his own wife to command the listing battleship, and as the admiral, he could not cut her adrift. The North American Free Trade Agreement  We’ve talked at great length about Bill Clinton’s failures; let’s shift gears and talk about one of his greatest successes. Let’s be clear: the overarching theme of the Clinton administration was patience. Clinton himself believed that moral absolutism was not the path forward; if the United States bided its time and struck when the iron was hot, it would become an even greater success in this post-Cold War global capitalist economy. After all, containment--50 years of it--had won the Cold War, had it not? Clinton was so convinced that this was the silver bullet that he was willing to place deficit reduction right alongside one of the most important objectives of his Presidential term: getting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that George H.W. Bush had signed during the lame duck period. NAFTA had originally begun as the brainchild of Ronald Reagan, believe it or not. Europe had already done something similar, the European Economic Community. To this end, in 1984 Congress passed something called the Trade and Tariff Act, which allowed fast-track authority to negotiate bilateral free trade agreements. Canada and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney got in on the action in 1985 when he agreed to begin discussions for a Canada/United States free trade agreement, and such an agreement was reached in 1988, going into effect on the first of the year in 1989. The following year, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari also requested a free trade agreement with the United States. You can sorta guess where this is going; Canada got into the negotiations, and in 1991 formal talks began. It was not until late 1992--after he had been voted out of office--that President Bush signed NAFTA into law. I should mention at this point: NAFTA wasn’t popular. House Minority Leader Bob Michel was worried that the treaty would fail if it came up for a vote. One of its lobbyists even went so far as to declare it “dead...I’ve counted enough noses on Capitol Hill.” House Speaker Tom Foley (D-WA) agreed. “The passions are flowing against it,” he said. One of the chief drivers of opposition?  What, did you think he’d just throw up his hands and walk away? No, even after the 1992 election, Ross Perot was still very much alive and very pissed at the idea of a free trade agreement covering all of North America. Bringing back an old metaphor, he warned of a “giant sucking sound” of jobs being lost to Mexico under NAFTA. Bill Clinton had learned some of the lessons he’d needed to learn during the health care fiasco, however. Walking into the East Room flanked by Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush, he spoke--and what he said would change everything. He’d just come back from the Oslo Peace Accords--in which Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas signed a “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements”, the first peace accord signed between these two opposing factions--and he was on fire. quote:Fifty years ago at the end of World War II, an unchallenged America was protected by the oceans and by our technological superiority and, very frankly, by the economic devastation of the people who could otherwise have been our competitors. We chose then to try to help rebuild our former enemies and to create a world of free trade supported by institutions which would facilitate it. As a result of that effort, global trade grew from $200 billion in 1950 to $800 billion in 1980. As a result, jobs were created and opportunity thrived all across the world. But make no mistake about it, our decision at the end of World War II to create a system of global, expanded, freer trade, and the supporting institutions, played a major role in creating the prosperity of the American middle class. Systematically, Bill Clinton dismantled the arguments of the people who he claimed were looking backwards, not forwards. quote:...but the average Mexican citizen, even though wages are much lower in Mexico, the average Mexican citizen is now spending $450 per year per person to buy American goods. That is more than the average Japanese, the average German, or the average Canadian buys...so when people say that this trade agreement is just about how to move jobs to Mexico so nobody can make a living, how do they explain the fact that Mexicans keep buying more products made in America every year? I cannot overstate this: the man could work a room, and he knew drat well how to win friends and influence people. Republican Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole was over the moon. “President Clinton hit it out of the ballpark,” he said. Senator John Danforth (R-MO) was equally as effusive in his praise, saying that “no one can now doubt the commitment of President Clinton”. In hindsight, I think Bill Clinton should have taken a long, hard look at the people he was being congratulated by. Former President Bush, however, was forced to face a hard truth. “I understand why he’s on the inside looking out and I’m on the outside looking in,” he said ruefully. Clinton’s approval ratings, hovering in the mid-30s, surged. They climbed back over 50% within a matter of weeks. Advisors were on cloud nine...all except his more liberal minds, such as Robert Reich and George Stephanopoulos, of course, which should have told Clinton more than it should have. Clinton used every possible avenue at his disposal to charm fence-sitters into voting for NAFTA’s passage--he played golf with some, made promises to others, and bent so many arms that people were comparing him to Lyndon Johnson. The administration, in contrast to the health care fight and so many other matters, was running such a tight ship that Vice President Gore crushed Ross Perot in a nationally-televised debate in November of 1993 on the matter. But Clinton had one more hurdle to cross: the House Minority Whip. If he was going to get NAFTA passed, he’d need Republican help--and that meant going to this man.  Congressman Newt Gingrich (R-GA) was a young, fire-breathing right-wing Congressman who had already been savaging the administration over the health care debacle. Not only that, he was in line to be the next House Speaker if Republicans took the House in 1994--which, current polling was suggesting, they would do. You know him now as a pudding-brained Trump stooge who should probably have gone into zookeeping, of course, but back then he was a terror...which is why it was so surprising when Gingrich agreed to help. If Democrats could come up with 100 votes for NAFTA in the House, Gingrich would do his part to whip the other 128 necessary from the GOP caucus. The microtargeting Clinton’s people had done was exceptional. For example, by promising to endorse side agreements with Mexico to protect Florida’s winter output of citrus, vegetables, and sugar against cheap Mexican imports, 13 of Florida’s 23 representatives switched sides and voted for NAFTA. It turned a sure loser into a sure thing--NAFTA passed 234-200 in the House and 61-38 in the Senate three days later. Columnist Anthony Lewis laid out just why Clinton had succeeded so thoroughly in this endeavor when his others had failed. quote:To be effective, a president must focus on objectives crucial to him and the country. And then he must be resolute in pursuit of those objectives...The opposition got so far ahead that many expected the president to back away from NAFTA. Instead he went all-out and won. Too often before now Clinton has backed away from declared positions. There was a widespread belief in Washington that if you made something difficult for him, he would cave. In politics that perception is disabling. Clinton will have dispelled it if he follows up his NAFTA performance with resolve on other issues. To those of you wondering why Clinton did not apply these same principles when trying to get health care through Congress, I can only surmise that he was blind to the fact that Hillary Clinton had become a lightning rod for criticism and hatred--and a very convenient target for the opposing forces to concentrate their fire on. I think if it had been literally anyone else in charge of the health care task force--a senator, a Cabinet official, a senior advisor, anyone--that he could have reassigned them or cut them loose and the initiative might have gained new life. Unfortunately, you can’t fire your own wife. Like I have already said--Hillary was brilliant, and she was certainly up to the task of managing the resources necessary to put together an overhaul of this magnitude. But she was also prickly, headstrong, and reacted badly to what she perceived as unfair criticism (which, to be fair, a lot of it was).
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Somalia OK, so in order to understand one of the first major foreign policy entanglements of the Clinton era, we’re going to need some background first. The country of Somalia, as you all know, is on the eastern edge of the African continent. Up until 1960, it was actually split in two--there was the British colony of Somaliland and the former Italian colony that was now known as the Trust Territory of Somaliland. In April of 1960 the leaders of the two territories met in the city of Mogadishu and agreed to unify as the Somali Republic. Cool, right? I mean, they even worked freedom of expression into their new constitution! Wrong. As with all former colonies in Africa, many of the maladies that beset Somalia were a direct result of the fact that they’d been split down the middle for years. Infighting began almost instantly, with north and south battling for control of the Somali parliament. For nine years the Somali Republic stumbled on until its last President, Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, was murdered in a coup d’etat by one of his own bodyguards. The military quickly moved to seize power, led by this man.  Mohamed Siad Barre was the commander of the Somali Republican Army, and he and his associates created the Supreme Revolutionary Council and renamed the country the Somali Democratic Republic. They banned political parties, arrested members of the old government, dissolved both the Somali Supreme Court and the parliament, and suspended the constitution. Rough all over. This was Somalia’s fate for over 20 long years...until 1991, when Barre was overthrown by a coalition of opposing Somali clans as part of the ongoing Somali Civil War. As early as the 1980s, Barre’s regime had been encountering resistance throughout the country from a variety of armed rebel groups. The country dissolved into a bloody civil war, with several factions battling for supremacy--and in September of 1991, fighting broke out in the city of Mogadishu, the bloodiest so far. It spread quickly throughout the country and killed nearly 20,000 people by the end of the year. Somalia’s agricultural facilities were utterly destroyed, leading to mass starvation. The food that wasn’t destroyed was stolen by the leaders of the respective factions and brought to local clan leaders to buy their support--and they would promptly sell it to neighboring African nations in exchange for weapons. Some sources put the amount of food stolen at roughly 80% of production. Jesus loving Christ. Finally, after a ceasefire in July 1992, the United Nations got involved. They sent 50 military observers to watch the food distribution channels, hoping to shut down the graft and the stealing. By that point, however, nearly 300,000 had died of starvation and nearly 1.5 million were in the process of doing so. The United States jumped into the fray a month later, when President Bush announced Operation Provide Relief. Ten C-130s and 400 people were deployed to Mombasa, Kenya, as part of a massive airlift of aid to the most remote regions of Somalia. It reduced the country’s reliance on truck convoys. Roughly 48,000 tons of food and medical supplies were delivered to the more than 3 million starving people in the following six months. So you’re probably reading this and wondering, “well, ok...but where does Bill Clinton fit into all this?” Well, the war in Somalia continued to smolter into 1993, well after Bill Clinton had come to power in the United States. After NAFTA and the health care initiative, the third major speech Bill Clinton was to give in 1993 was to the United Nations, and it was during this time that the UN forces’ efforts in Somalia were facing a direct challenge from this man.  Warlord Muhammad Farah Aideed had been a former general in the army and a diplomat, as well as the chairman of the United Somali Congress. Now, he was one of several warlords looking to establish supremacy over the entire country--which he did by assaulting the port at Mogadishu. What resulted is what we now call the Battle of Mogadishu. In early October 1993, Bill Clinton deployed the 75th Army Ranger Regiment, 1st Delta Force Regiment, and the 160th Spec Ops Airborne (codenamed “The Night Stalkers”). They were going to capture two key figures in Aideed’s power hierarchy: foreign minister Omar Salad Elmi and his top advisor, Mohamed Hassan Awale. The plan went something like this (and I apologize, military planning and strategy really is not my thing): the Deltas would assault the building the pair were in using MH-6 Little Bird choppers and secure the targets inside while four Ranger paratrooper squads would rappel down from a series of hovering Black Hawk helicopters. Yup, it’s exactly what you’re thinking. This incident would become known as the “Black Hawk Down” affair, which spawned a 1994 movie of the same name. Why? Because Aideed’s forces came out firing. One Black Hawk was shot out of the air by a shoulder-mounted RPG, killing both pilots and severely wounding the crew chiefs. The resulting pandemonium created confusion between the ground convoy and assault team, waiting 20 minutes for their orders to move because both thought the other would contact them first. If this was a Three Stooges episode, this is roughly where Moe would clonk their heads together. During this 20-minute interim a second Black Hawk was shot down by another RPG-7, and the number of wounded were growing as the Rangers and Deltas found themselves under heavy fire. Aideed’s militia overran the crash sites where the Americans had hunkered down and took the pilot of the second Black Hawk captive, but they were fortunately repelled by aggressive small arms fire and strafing runs from the Little Bird helicopters. The bodies of those who died, however, were not so lucky. The bodies of two of the dead Delta Force soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by crowds of civilians and Aideed militia forces. Through negotiation and a little bit of arm-twisting, Bill Clinton’s special envoy to Somalia, Robert Oakley, was able to get all the bodies back--but some were returned in poor condition, one with a severed head. The captured pilot was released after 11 days in captivity. Indecisive Bill Clinton might have appeared in public, but in private, aides remember him reacting more or less like most Americans did upon hearing the news. “When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers,” he’d remarked angrily (FYI, Somali casualties numbered close to 1,000 in the Battle of Mogadishu, so American troops were doing just that). George Stephanopoulos recalled Clinton turning on his National Security Advisor, Tony Lake, red in the face with rage, and declaring “I believe in killing people who try to hurt you...I can’t believe we’re being pushed around by these pricks.” His attitude notwithstanding, and despite the relief efforts, this was thought of as one of the biggest foreign policy failures in recent history--and it would be followed by an equally embarrassing fiasco in Haiti (sorry, we won’t be covering this one) that led journalists to declare that Clinton’s national security team was not long for this world. “Rumors are rife that one of the President’s advisors--either [National Security Advisor Tony] Lake, Secretary of State Warren Christopher or Secretary of Defense Les Aspin--may be forced out if embarrassing crises keep accumulating.” The Oklahoma City Bombing  Let’s switch gears a bit and talk about something Bill Clinton did right, yeah? Clinton had just begun a meeting at the White House with the Prime Minister of Turkey when a note was handed to him. It was around 9:02 AM Central Standard Time. The note read: “Half of federal building in OK City blown up. Expect heavy casualties. [Attorney General] Janet Reno has dispatched FBI.” Starting this section off with a bang. Clinton’s first thoughts were of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. He was, after all, in the same room with a man who, just recently, had escaped an attempt on his own life. Prime Minister Tansu Ciller of Turkey was helping to move his country towards inclusion in the European Union, but this also meant that “fundamentalism would have moved up to the borders of Europe”, as Clinton put it. Was the explosion in Oklahoma City an act of Islamic fundamentalist extremists? And if so, why Oklahoma City? It did make a certain amount of sense, if you assume that the bombing was committed by Islamist extremists. There had been a convention of Islamic scholars in the city not long prior to the bombing, and the city had three mosques--impressive, given its middling size and the fact that the Muslim population in Oklahoma is fairly small. The bombing of the World Trade Center two years earlier (I apologize for not talking about this; topics had to be cut) was certainly different in scale; the WTC buildings represented something far grander than the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City did. However, there were certain logistical similarities between this and similar attacks, including the bombing of the Beirut embassy in Lebanon: a massive truck bomb had gone off and flattened the building. Witnesses in Oklahoma reported seeing a truck drive up to the front of the Murrah Federal Building. Two men had gotten out and driven off in a separate vehicle, leaving the truck--they were described as “Middle Eastern” in appearance. Suspicious indeed. I can’t overstate how bad it was. Some of you might be old enough to remember: the force of the bomb was felt for nearly thirty miles and left a crater thirty feet wide and eight feet deep, blasting out the entire glass front of the Murrah Building as well as the structure behind it. Freed of their supports, the nine floors collapsed on one another like a house of cards, crushing the building’s occupants. All day on Wednesday, the death toll rose--as did the number of missing. Federal buildings across the nation closed down. Teams of FBI and other law enforcement agents swarmed the scene, sifting through the evidence and packaging it up for analysis off-site. Bill Clinton was visibly angry when he stood in the White House Briefing Room. Republicans had fallen noticeably silent, a fact that was not lost on him. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his fellow Republicans might rail against the government, but the people of the nation were now looking to Bill Clinton to deal with a problem that was far more than just a city or state issue. quote:It was an act of cowardice, and it was evil. The United States will not tolerate it. And I will not allow the people of this country to be intimidated by evil cowards. Let there be no room for doubt. We will find the people who did this. When we do, justice will be swift, certain, and severe. These people are killers and they must be treated like killers. The next day, however, as media suspicion focused on Islamic militants as the likely suspects, the FBI and local police were increasingly convinced, based on the evidence, that they weren’t responsible. The Oklahoma City bombing was, they realized, a home-grown hate crime, carried out by American white supremacists. From there, things moved quickly. The truck that had been used as a bomb was pieced together from the rubble, and the VIN number was discovered within sixteen hours of the bombing. After investigators got a bead on the Ford plant that had manufactured it, the truck was traced to Elliott’s Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas...and detailed descriptions of the two white dudes who had rented the vehicle were being blared across all media outlets across the country. Someone watching recognized one of the composites--he called the FBI tipline and identified this man.  Timothy McVeigh was a 27-year-old Army veteran of the Desert Storm campaign in the Middle East. He, like many other budding white nationalists, had become radicalized when Bill Clinton took office. McVeigh and an old Army buddy, Terry Nichols (who would eventually become the man in the other composite sketch), joined a paramilitary organization known as the Michigan Militia, as subsequent information would reveal. Instantly, a massive dragnet was thrown over several states in an attempt to capture McVeigh--which, as it turns out, was easy. The sumbitch was already in police custody in Noble County, about sixty miles away from Oklahoma City. He’d been stopped by a traffic cop only half an hour after the bomb had gone off, driving a lime-colored Mercury Marquis without plates. Oh, did I mention that the stupid rear end in a top hat also had an unregistered pistol on him? And it was loaded with armor-piercing “cop-killer” bullets? Yeah. McVeigh really wasn’t the brightest light on the Christmas tree, fortunately for the feds. He was in lockup in the county jail when the local police realized that he looked like one of the composite sketches on TV--and he might actually be the bombing suspect. Many of you know what happened from here. McVeigh refused to talk initially, but the picture was getting clearer and clearer as investigators searched his home and vehicle. The bombing, according to investigators, had been a deliberate, symbolic assault on the federal government. America’s shock turned quickly to anger: we were almost unable to believe that we had harbored this viper, this Christian-raised terrorist right in our own backyard. Yeah, that was back when we still had shame. Remember? Anger gave way to fear, though. If this could happen in the heart of the country, it could happen anywhere. It was time for Bill Clinton to do what he did best: play Healer-in-Chief. These would be remembered as some of his finest hours. I don’t remember the speech--I was only ten and more interested in action figures and cartoons than I was in current events--but it was really something. Speaking before a crowd of mourners at the Oklahoma State Fair Arena, Bill Clinton showed why he’d been elected three years earlier. quote:Today our nation joins with you in grief, [the president said to his fellow mourners.] We share your hope against hope that some may still survive. We thank all who have worked so heroically to save lives and to solve this crime, those here in Oklahoma and those who are all across this great land and many who left their own lives to come here to work hand in hand with you. We pledge to do all we can to help you heal the injured, to rebuild this city, and to bring to justice those who did this evil. I would encourage you all to find the full text of this speech. It is absolutely incredible. What happened next, Nigel Hamilton writes, is exactly what America needed to happen. quote:Simple, sincere, elegiac, and compassionate, the memorial speech helped a shocked nation to recover. Never had the still-young president, at forty-nine, looked more like his admired predecessor JFK, or sounded more like President Reagan, the revered master of homey, heartfelt rhetoric. In a matter of days, President Clinton's federal team had solved the heinous crime while demonstrating to Congress and to the nation the importance of responsible and responsive government in a democracy....More important, says a former aide, “crises free Clinton from having to balance the competing claims of interest groups. Freed from his congenital compromising, he can be decisive”. We make light of this phrase now, especially in this hell timeline we live in...but this was truly the moment Bill Clinton became President. The Presidential Election of 1996  I suppose this story starts in January of 1996, when Bill Clinton read his State of the Union to Congress. Aides recall being anxious--they had already read the response, and on paper, the response sounded better than the speech itself. Short version? They needn’t have worried. Clinton had a gift for outdistancing subpar oratory, and his body language reflected a man totally at ease with himself. He even managed to get one over on Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who earlier in the day had said that he only wanted to hear Bill Clinton say four words: “Thank you and goodnight”. Shaking hands with Gingrich in front of the cameras, Clinton slipped him a scrap of paper. When Gingrich unfolded it, he saw that “Thank you and goodnight” was written on it.  The speech was over an hour in length and he was interrupted eighty different times for applause. One thing to bear in mind, too--Gingrich had been making threats about shutting down the government once the continuing resolution ran out on Saturday. The President closed with a couple of remarks clearly aimed at the Speaker and the Republican caucus. He pointed out his guest, a man named Richard Dean, who had run into the Alfred P. Murrah Building as it burned and rescued three women. The resulting applause lines got even Republicans on their feet. Before they sat, however, Clinton delivered a rhetorical punch to the gut that left the GOP doubled up and wheezing. He said that Dean, as an employee of the Social Security Administration, had been “forced out of his office” when the government had shut down the previous November. “I challenge all of you in this chamber,” Clinton said. “Never, ever shut down the federal government again.” Remember this shutdown, because despite the fact that it didn’t merit its own section in this narrative, it’s a key point in our tale for several reasons, one of which I will discuss after this section. Anyway, the speech rocked Republicans like a one-two to the jaw. That, of course, and the fact that Bill Clinton got to talk about an excellent economy, where unemployment and inflation were the lowest they’d been in almost three decades, new businesses were springing up like grass in April, and American carmakers were selling more cars than Japan for the first time since the 70s. So why am I telling you all this? Cause this was the dude who gave the response. Apparently, no one had figured out that the SOTU response was a career-killer yet.  Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) was an old, veteran lawmaker from the Midwest, and the current Senate Majority Leader after the GOP had swept to power in Congress in 1994. And he had a problem. See, Bill Clinton had entered the triangulation stage of his Presidency--roughly the point where he tacked hard to the center and center-right. He’d talked about V-chips in TVs, heavier prison sentences for repeat offenders, and he’d even told the nation that ‘the era of big government is over’. Now, you and I see this for the bullshit it is today, but in 1996, Bill Clinton had a better sense of where the mood of the country was than almost any politician alive. This infuriated Republicans, because all they were left with was the “bitter gruel” served up by Bob Dole in his response. The response was a disaster. Delivered in Dole’s deserted, poorly-lit office, Dole stumbled over lines on the TelePrompter and offered no policy alternatives in the ten long minutes he was on the air. Republicans were aghast. Rush Limbaugh, newly-minted far-right Clinton critic, called it “lackluster”. One RNC official was quoted as saying, “My God, he had a week or two to prepare, and he couldn’t even read it. If this were the campaign, Clinton could quit right now, because he’s got it.” Congressman Joe Scarborough (R-FL) echoed this sentiment. “I’m in awe of the guy,” he said. “He’s a great television presence and I think Dole’s going to have a hard time.” Oh, yes, I should have mentioned--Dole was the front-runner for the Republican nomination for President in 1996. This response was supposed to be his Nessun Dorma, and instead it made him look like a whiny, out-of-touch old crank. Hardly a fitting replacement for Bill Clinton. His competitors took advantage, too. Former Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander (who you may know as the current senior Senator from Tennessee) said “Bob Dole doesn’t stack up very well to Bill Clinton….he’s old, wooden, not engaged, too partisan.” There was only one contender in 1996, indeed, that Clinton feared, and it wasn’t Bob Dole.  Colin Powell was an Army General and the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but no one around Clinton thought there was any danger from him. Aide Doug Sosnik recalls: quote:He called me one night at midnight, at home. It was a Sunday night. And he asked if I had read the Colin Powell profile that day in the Post. Asked whether he was going to run or not. And I said, 'Mr. President, I didn't read any articles on Colin Powell, because I don't think he's running; I never have, and I'm not wasting my time!' My wife was watching me talk to the president of the United States like that—and started to laugh! Powell was an afterthought. Clinton’s polling was rising fast, and he’d stolen all of Powell’s potential thunder as a candidate. He could still get into the race as a VP candidate, but Powell was of the opinion “at the time Dole was looking for a Vice President, that Dole probably was not going to win”. Well, they were to be proved prophetic. Dole received high marks for helping end the shutdown in a statesmanlike manner in November 1995, but Republicans were at war with themselves--and the two factions were, ironically, led by Dole and Gingrich. The acrimony was, in fact, enough to cause Dole to lose the primary in New Hampshire to this man:  He LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES. Pat Buchanan, as you all know, was a former Nixon speechwriter and pretty much the avatar of right-wing white rage in the nation at that point. Dole losing the race in NH reflected “the ultimate Faustian bargain”, Doug Sosnik reflected later. “[He was] the leader of the Senate with a right-of-center party. He knew he couldn’t have any daylight between himself and Gingrich and the right-wingers to get the nomination. But he also knew that Gingrich was driving him off a cliff.” Dole didn’t exactly inspire with his VP pick either.  Talk about an interesting life. Jack Kemp had started in sports, actually. He’d played quarterback in the AFL, NFL and CFL for 13 years--and been a star for the San Diego Chargers and Buffalo Bills. He’d followed that up by a stint in Congress for nearly 20 years--after which George H.W. Bush appointed him HUD Secretary. Kemp was a conservative, but he wasn’t one of Gingrich’s people--a fact that caused the rift in the GOP to widen rather than narrow. One thing I should mention: Bill Clinton watched all of this like a hawk. He wanted Dole as his opponent in 1996, so he knew that he should stay away from personally attacking Dole, or even Gingrich--whatever idiocies came out of their mouths would have to be enough. They’d have to dig their own graves. He refused to allow Dick Morris (yes, the “little poo poo” was still around!) to flash Gingrich and Dole’s faces in an ad attacking proposed GOP budget cuts. When Morris’ people protested, Clinton shot them down. “That’s the way it’s going to be, and you do what I tell you to do.” Why, you might be wondering, was Clinton trying to “protect” Dole so much? New Press Secretary Mike McCurry wondered the same thing. “Why do you care so much about what Dole’s position in the primaries is going to be?” he asked Clinton. In answer, the President claimed it was because the other contestants for the GOP nomination were “a bunch of nitwits”, and that as President he wanted, if he lost, “to have some confidence in the person I hand the keys to.” At this point, you must have a lot of questions. So did McCurry. Clinton never affected false piety. He seemed well on his way to reelection, so why would he be telling his Press Secretary that “something could happen to me” and the public “might throw me out on my rear end”? The Whitewater investigation was already in progress, and the public’s perception of Bill Clinton had remained largely unchanged...so what did Bill Clinton know that Mike McCurry and his other campaign staffers didn’t? The answer to that question is forthcoming. For now, we’re concentrating on the election--and as Team Clinton predicted, it wasn’t close.  Clinton’s map looked similar to 1992--he’d traded Georgia for Florida, however--but again he was denied a popular vote majority, only taking 48%. Dole only took 38%, however, thanks, once again, to the presence of this man.  Heeeeeeee’s baaaaaaaack! Yes, Ross Perot, once again demonstrating that he had more money than sense, had tossed his hat into the ring, this time as the candidate of the Reform Party. However, he got a lot less attention than he had in 1992, and he took only slightly more than half of the vote percentage he got in 1992--around 11%. This was most likely due to his exclusion from the Presidential debates. Bill Clinton had won four more years as President--and as rocky as his first term had been, it was nothing compared to his second. The Shutdown And The Blue Dress You all know what this section is about, but what you might not know if you’re not a politics junkie is that it didn’t spring up out of nowhere. No, in fact, our story starts in November of 1995, before Bill Clinton was reelected and during a contentious budget showdown with the Republican Congress. It began after Bill Clinton’s triumphant return from Belfast, in which economic prosperity had finally cooled the decades-long war between Protestants and Catholics. He faced a hostile crowd at Baumholder AFB in Germany, where protestors waved signs that said “Draft Dodger Go Home” and “The President Who Stole Christmas”. He was going home into troubled waters, too. The Republicans in Congress, after taking power in early 1995, had begun investigating everything in his life they could get their hands on. They’d already been beaten to the punch, however, by a three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court. They’d appointed this man to replace Robert Fiske, a moderate who had been appointed by Janet Reno, to investigate the Whitewater land deal.  Kenneth Starr had previously served as the United States Solicitor General and he’d been a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals. It galls me to say this, but on paper, the man must have looked like an attractive choice at the time. He’d actually been on a shortlist for the Supreme Court at one point--George H.W. Bush needed a replacement for Justice William Brennan--but the DoJ leadership feared he might not be reliably conservative enough. Strange how these things unfold. Anyway, the newly reauthorized Ethics In Government Act gave Starr wide-ranging powers, including the right to subpoena anyone who might have information relevant to the investigation. He would subsequently be granted authority by the Republican Congress to investigate the firing of the White House travel staff, the suicide of Vince Foster, the Rose Law Firm, and the Paula Jones lawsuit. Quick diversion! Paula Jones, you’ll all remember, was the woman working the desk at the Excelsior Hotel in May 1991. According to the story, Bill Clinton invited her up to his hotel room, propositioned her, and sexually assaulted her. She kept quiet about the incident until 1994, when notorious Clinton-hater (and now Democratic convert!) David Brock wrote a piece in The American Spectator about it. She filed a sexual harassment suit against Clinton on May 6, 1994, two days before the three-year statute of limitations on such crimes would run out. Originally, her lawsuit was given summary judgment by Judge Susan Webber Wright, as Jones could not prove she had suffered any damages, emotional or financial, from the incident. Jones appealed to the Eighth Circuit, where Clinton’s defense team challenged Jones’ right to bring a civil lawsuit against a sitting President for an incident that occurred prior to his becoming President. On May 27, though, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the lawsuit could proceed. However, Jones’ legal team broke down quickly. A few months later, her attorneys resigned, believing that the settlement they had extracted from Clinton was sufficient and Jones had refused it. She wanted an apology as well. Eventually, she became a conservative cudgel for Republicans to use against Clinton--but she reduced the damages she sought to $525,000 and dropped her demand for an apology. She would receive $850,000. Clinton’s law license would, once he left the Presidency, be suspended for five years as per an agreement with the Arkansas Bar Association. OK, so that’s that. I covered it. Back to our regularly scheduled doldrums. The point of this story is that you should realize that Bill Clinton liked stepping out on his wife. Now, as all of this was going on, with Whitewater, Starr, Jones, and all the other investigations, Bill Clinton was battling a Republican Congress to pass a budget--but there was one important difference. He had a strong Chief of Staff now in former OMB Director Leon Panetta, and he had vested a lot of trust in Panetta’s ability to negotiate. Gingrich had his own problems too. He was facing a special prosecutor for ethics violations over his book contract with Rupert Murdoch, his lecture course, and his reelection funding, and he was afraid to lose the Speakership--so he wanted to avert a shutdown. However, by December when the continuing resolution ran out, it was clear: Gingrich no longer rode herd on the hard right. They were now led by his Whip, this man.  Congressman Tom DeLay (R-TX) had been one of the architects of the Republican Revolution in 1994 along with Gingrich, and as repayment for his help, Gingrich had given him his old job--that of House Majority Whip. “The revolution will continue even if they bring him down,” DeLay said adamantly. The Republicans in the House favored another shutdown, even in the face of Senate Majority Leader Dole’s acceptance of the compromise proposal Clinton had offered. “You’ve got to understand...we are ideologues. We have an agenda. We have a philosophy,” DeLay insisted stubbornly. Gingrich faced opposition from every corner--the rank-and-file felt that he couldn’t cave and agree to another CR. Clinton broke the bad news to reporters around 6pm. quote:...today the Republicans in Congress broke off our negotiations on how best to balance the budget in seven years. They said they would not even continue to talk unless we agreed right now to make deep and unconscionable cuts in Medicare and Medicaid. That’s unacceptable. The cuts they propose would deprive millions of people of health care: poor children, pregnant women, the disabled, seniors in nursing homes. They would let Medicare wither on the vine into a second-class system. And these things are simply not necessary to balance the budget… And so the government shut down, for the second time during Bill Clinton’s reign. Now, when the government shuts down, all non-essential government employees are sent home. That includes White House staff, as well as all valets, cleaning staff, cooks, and other administrative personnel. Often, what this means is that unpaid interns are made to step up into more difficult roles so as to keep things running. What it meant during this shutdown, however, is that one particular intern got way, WAY too close to the President.  Monica Lewinsky was working in Leon Panetta’s office as an unpaid intern, a job she’d gotten with the help of a family connection. She was only 23 years old at the time. A few months later, Lewinsky was relocated to the Pentagon by her superiors, because they felt she’d gotten uncomfortably close to the President. United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson was asked by the White House to interview Lewinsky for a job in 1997. He did so, and he offered her a job--which she declined. She confided in one of the members of the Office of Public Affairs, Linda Tripp, that she had been sexually intimate with Bill Clinton on no less than nine separate occasions. Tripp told Lewinsky to save all the gifts that Clinton had allegedly given her...and told her not to clean a blue dress that she had worn during one of the occasions that had been stained with semen. Ew. Tripp then contacted literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, who you might know better as the mother of right-wing scumbag Jonah Goldberg. Goldberg advised Tripp to secretly record all conversations she had with Lewinsky. Tripp took her advice and began to surreptitiously record Lewinsky in September of 1997. That’s when Kenneth Starr got involved, because Goldberg told her she should take the tapes to Starr’s office (they were working on the Paula Jones case at the time). In the fall, Goldberg began to talk with reporters, including Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, about the tapes. There was a problem, too--Lewinsky decided to submit an affidavit in the Jones case stating that she had no physical relationship with the President, and she asked Tripp to lie on the stand. Instead, Tripp gave the tapes to Starr. News of the scandal broke first on...have you guessed it? Yes! The Drudge Report. Yes, if not for Bill Clinton’s wayward penis, Matt Drudge might have remained one of many faceless, nameless peddlers of right-wing fake news. Drudge asserted that Newsweek editors were sitting on a story that would expose the affair, and consequently the story broke into the mainstream press on January 21, 1998, via the Washington Post. The White House immediately issued a blanket denial, but the startling amount of detail (and the fact that the Post had decided to run the story at all) gave it too many legs to just be brushed off. So, on January 26, Bill Clinton went before news cameras at a White House press conference and issued his personal denial. quote:...Now, I have to go back to work on my State of the Union speech. And I worked on it until pretty late last night. But I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you. We know, of course, that he was lying. And the worst part about Bill Clinton’s recklessness on this front was that he did it when he knew he was under investigation, by Kenneth Starr for the Whitewater land deal and by Paula Jones’ lawyers for sexual harassment. We studied this bizarre phenomenon surrounding men who cheat when we covered Jack Kennedy--we asked why they do it. In Bill Clinton’s case, however, there doesn’t seem to be any possible answers, beyond the need for attention and approval bred into him by the absent father figure in his life. Nigel Hamilton writes, however, that the Lewinsky matter got away from him. Fast. quote:To give in to momentary lust was one thing—a lapse of self-control. But for the president of the United States, throughout the winter and spring of 1996, to have pursued his compliant intern (who had by then been appointed to a full-time clerical job in the Eisenhower Building) was folly. It not only raised the stakes in terms of risk, it transformed the lapse into a relationship. With each act of sexual hubris, the now middle-aged president grew more embroiled, more aroused, more unable to fight temptation. Guilt, fantasy, escapism, and excitement struggled in a heady combination—a cocktail the most powerful citizen in the world could not resist. If you’re seeing some weird parallels to the rationale used to explain Jack Kennedy’s philandering, you’re not alone. Bill Clinton did, however, take a further journey into the macabre and gross with his 1998 recollections of the time he spent with Monica Lewinsky. Here’s Nigel Hamilton once again. quote:"I formed an opinion early in 1996," the president would admit two years later, "once I got into this unfortunate and wrong conduct, that when I stopped it, which I knew I'd have to do and which I should have done a long time before I did, that she would talk about it. Not because Monica Lewinsky is a bad person," he was at pains to emphasize. "She's basically a good girl. She's a good young woman with a good heart and a good mind. I think she is burdened by some unfortunate conditions of her, her upbringing. But she's a good person." Reading this passage made me unironically angry. Bill Clinton comes dangerously close to slut-shaming here, and not once does he accept responsibility for his actions. He does cop to it a bit more in his memoirs, but here there is no trace of self-awareness. What he didn’t understand, Hamilton writes, is that Monica Lewinsky wasn’t just the “forgotten French girl” of the novel Anna Karenina, so to speak. She didn’t just want sex from a powerful man for favors, she was genuinely in search of a real relationship. And Bill Clinton, well… quote:...the smartest president ever to occupy the Oval Office in the twentieth century, was overcome by the same muddled motives that characterized the follies of hundreds of thousands of ordinary men in America, and millions in history in every nation across the world: erotic thrill at the sensual power he was exerting over a voluptuous, open-hearted female; gratitude to the young woman for offering herself to him sexually; electric excitement at the illicitness of their encounters (supposedly avoiding detection or the knowledge of his staff and Secret Service detail); delight in finding a liberated post-adolescent with whom to share the sheer fun of unbridled sex talk. That’s Hamilton’s take, anyway. I’m not sure, myself. The difference now, of course, was that Bill Clinton felt guilt. He told Monica that if he was in his twenties and unmarried, he would have had no qualms about a relationship with her--but he was married, over fifty, and he felt guilt for stepping out on Hillary. He didn’t want his child to view him as a monster who made her mother’s life miserable. So he told Monica the relationship must end--but that they could remain friends....only to restart the relationship in March of 1996 after a particularly difficult period in his life, wherein the IRA had restarted hostilities in Northern Ireland and the Paula Jones case was ramping up. I told you all that so I could tell you what happened two years later, when the relationship became public. Clinton didn’t mention the allegations during the State of the Union that he gave immediately following the famous denial, and as for Hillary Clinton, she stood by him--and gave rise to yet another famous phrase you might know. On January 27, she went on NBC’s Today and said, “The great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for President.” Here’s the funny thing: I’m not sure that Hillary was 100% wrong. There was no doubt that the right-wing grift machine had kicked into high gear after Clinton’s inauguration, and it had hit the nitrous oxide button when the sex scandals had started to break. Anyway, the debate began: Did he? Didn’t he? What exactly happened and when? The media wrestled with this throughout the summer, but nothing could be definitely established since Lewinsky herself was steadfastly refusing to testify in front of a grand jury or discuss the affair under oath. However, on July 28, 1998, she got the shield she needed. Kenneth Starr offered her transactional immunity in exchange for grand jury testimony and a semen sample from the infamous blue dress to be tested against Bill Clinton’s DNA. Bill Clinton’s denials amounted for nothing. This came on the heels of a retired Secret Service agent testifying that he saw Monica Lewinsky and the President alone together, and his invocation of executive privilege in the face of overwhelming evidence that he was lying looked bad indeed. He dropped the executive privilege claim, because he feared it would reach the Supreme Court and he didn’t want to be the first President since Nixon to test this particular theory. He was served with a subpoena by Kenneth Starr’s team, and agreed to testify voluntarily before a grand jury in August of 1998. It was then that he admitted to having “inappropriate intimate contact”...which meant he’d lied under oath in January during the deposition he’d given in the Paula Jones case. He had claimed then to have no knowledge of an affair between himself and Monica Lewinsky. That evening he spoke to the nation. quote:Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong. It constituted a critical lapse in judgment and a personal failure on my part for which I am solely and completely responsible And yet somehow he never, ever copped to lying. That’s where we got the famous phrase “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” It came from a particularly appalling bit of dissembling Clinton tried to perform in front of the grand jury to rationalize why he hadn’t, in fact, lied in January during the Paula Jones deposition. When he told Jim Lehrer of PBS right after the story broke that “There is no improper relationship”, technically, he was right, because the relationship did not currently exist in the present tense. Yeah, no, I’m not lying. This was literally his argument. The dumbest thing about this whole case was that all Bill Clinton had to do was tell the truth. “Yes, I did it, and I’m sorry.” Republicans would have had nothing. But he chose to lie, and this gave the GOP the opening they needed. To add to the weirdness of this whole affair, Operation Infinite Reach--a military campaign that involved launching cruise missiles at targets in Afghanistan and the Sudan--was executed three days after Clinton’s testimony to the grand jury. Republicans promptly accused him of using the attacks as a diversion from his bad press, drawing parallels to a recently-released movie where a fictional President does something similar by declaring war on Albania. The name of the movie? Wag The Dog. Another useless political catchphrase was born. Republicans had Clinton over a barrel....and they might have made great political hay out of it, had it not been for Kenneth Starr. See, Starr was an angry, embittered, publicity-seeking sack of poo poo, and since he hadn’t been able to destroy the Clintons for financial crimes stemming from the Whitewater land deal, he decided to switch the spotlight onto Clinton’s private behavior in a manner we had not yet ever seen. The Starr report at the end of the investigation would be, according to those who read it, the most scandalous and salacious document of its kind in American history. Starr made sure that Americans were made privy to the most intimate details of Bill Clinton’s sexual behavior--the acts he performed with Lewinsky, where they did it, how he, er, “finished”, and their loving pillow talk afterwards. Nigel Hamilton refers to it as “obsessive stalking”, and I’m inclined to agree. Alan Dershowitz, who you might all know as a senile old Fox News “legal expert” by now, said that it had become an example of “sexual McCarthyism” in America. Starr’s motives had, after all, been suspect ever since he offered help to Paula Jones in 1993 instead of staying within his given mandate. Here’s Hamilton with a rather scathing indictment of the man: quote:...his documentary erotica would go down in history as the most egregious, unmerited, salacious, and deliberate misuse of public money (over $60 million) ever sanctioned by Congress, or funded by ordinary taxpayers. But Starr didn't care—for the genius-IQ president was, in the jealous eyes of the paragon of judicial mediocrity, all too invitingly human. Tell us how you really feel, Nigel. So what, the public asked themselves, did Starr hope to achieve by making this lousy Chuck Tingle book public? Hamilton again asks the same question. quote:Why was this any of Kenneth Starr's business? Was he the Spanish Inquisition, suddenly the guardian of private morality in America? Oblivious of the history of intimacy in the White House, and indifferent to the sad but not criminal midlife folly he was exposing, Starr became hell-bent on creating a crime: a wrongdoing that would justify a political lynching, and thus bring down the president….Starr would ultimately self-destruct and become the most reviled lawyer in America—and his Republican efforts would profoundly compromise American standing and security in the world. It was that question right there--that central question--that would cause Republicans to fail in their efforts. Starr badly overplayed his hand, and the public knew it. Clinton’s approval ratings didn’t sink, they rose. On September 14, 1998, Gallup clocked Clinton’s approval rating at 64%--the highest point it had ever reached. Only 31% said he should be impeached and only 36% said he should resign. Two months later, Democrats defied the midterm rule and gained seats in the legislature, adding five House seats and maintaining the status quo in the Senate. Surveys consistently showed that a majority disapproved of the idea of impeachment hearings, and they didn’t want Clinton to resign. As though they had not heard what America was saying, the GOP forged ahead anyway. On December 11, 1998, the House GOP approved two articles of impeachment pertaining to perjury--one for lying to a grand jury and one for lying in his testimony in response to questions about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky--and a third article about obstruction of justice. They were going headfirst into the shallow end of the pool, a sentiment accentuated by their rejection of a Democratic proposal to censure the President--a measure that would have allowed them to express disapproval without resorting to impeachment. They should have taken the exit when it was offered. Two articles of impeachment cleared the House--the grand jury perjury one passed 228-206, with five Democrats voting in favor and five Republicans voting against. The obstruction charge passed by a slimmer margin of 221-212, with eight Republicans voting against. The Senate would need two-thirds to vote in favor, which meant 67 votes, on at least one count to convict Clinton and remove him from office...and regrettably for the GOP, the perjury charge went down to a 45 yea-55 nay defeat and the obstruction of justice charge met the same fate at 50 yea-50 nay. All 45 Democrats in the Senate voted “not guilty” on both the charges presented to them, and the five Republicans who voted against on both charges were John Chafee (R-RI), Susan Collins (R-ME), Jim Jeffords (R-VT), Olympia Snowe (R-ME) and Arlen Specter (R-PA). The GOP didn’t have the votes. They had taken their swing and missed by a country mile, and Bill Clinton’s approval ratings soared to historic highs. He was near 70% by the time he left office, and the GOP didn’t recover...at least until 2000. But you already know that story. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 11:46 on Mar 12, 2019 |
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Mar 12, 2019 01:42
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The Elian Gonzalez Affair This final section is in here thanks to input from the people in the Discord D&D thread, so thanks to you all for making your voices heard. A little background first: In 1966, the United States passed the Cuban Adjustment Act. What it did was allow us to provide political asylum for Cubans fleeing the Castro regime. Instead of being immediately deported, Cuban refugees without visas who landed on our shores were paroled and given the opportunity to apply for permanent asylum after a year. Additionally, we also issued 20,000 lottery visas to Cuban immigrants per the “Wet Foot/Dry Foot” policy. For those of you not familiar with this phrase, it meant that if you reached the U.S. mainland you got asylum, but if the Coast Guard got you at sea, you were sent back to Cuba. Elian Gonzalez was a five-year old boy who, in the year 2000, was found clinging to an inner tube by fishermen with two other survivors of a 12-person party that had fled Cuba. His mother and ten others had died at sea during the crossing. According to an account that Elian’s cousin gave federal authorities later, she said he told her the motor had broken on the boat and it had started to take on water. When a storm blew up around them, his mother had placed him in an inner tube for safety. He had fallen asleep, and when he woke up, he found himself adrift at sea. Anyway, the fishermen handed Elian and the others over to the Coast Guard. He was treated for his injuries and given a temporary deferral by INS, then handed over to his uncle, Lazaro Gonzalez, who lived in Little Havana in Miami. This is when it got interesting, because this guy got involved.  Yup. Fidel Castro, as you all know, had seized power in Cuba in the late 1950s, and had turned it into a repressive Communist regime. The Gonzalez family was told that “some functionary of the government would be coming to get the boy” as a result of Castro’s meeting with Juan Miguel Gonzalez, Elian’s father, back in Cuba. Instantly, Elian became a symbol to the exile community in Florida, reminding them of the politically and economically oppressive conditions in Cuba--conditions that forced a mother to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to give her child a better life elsewhere. Anyway, Elian’s father Juan Miguel informed the family in Miami that he had left Cuba without “permission” and demanded that his son be returned to him. Local Cubans in Miami stood behind Lazaro Gonzalez, Elian’s uncle, and Elian’s cousin Marysleysis, who served as his caretaker and spokesperson for the Miami paternal relatives. On January 21, 2000, Elian’s grandmothers, Mariela Quintana and Raquel Rodriguez, flew from Cuba to the United States to seek Elian’s return. They were only able to see Elian on neutral ground--at the home of a local university President--but they flew to Washington and met with Attorney General Janet Reno as well. After nine days of coverage--in which Republicans announced that they did not have the votes to grant Elian Gonzalez U.S. citizenship. As for Elian himself, on April 14, 2000, a video was released where Elian told his father Juan Miguel that he wanted to stay in the United States. This video is controversial, however, because many people who watched it--including some accomplished child psychologists--thought he’d been coached. A male voice can allegedly be heard off camera directing the boy what to say. It’s bolstered by an interview Elian Gonzalez gave five years later to 60 Minutes, in which he said his family members were “telling me bad things about [my father]”, and “were also telling me to tell him I did not want to go back to Cuba, and I always told them I wanted to.” Remember this, because it’s a key point in this story. Bear in mind that opinion polls actually supported this outcome. Throughout the custody battle, a majority of Americans believed that Elian belonged with his father in Cuba, and that doing so would be in his best interests. Nevertheless, on April 19, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Elian had to stay in America until the Miami Gonzalezes could appeal for an asylum hearing in May. Meanwhile, Attorney General Reno had originally set a hard date of April 13 for returning Elian to his father--but the Miami relatives defied the federal order. It quickly devolved into something resembling a hostage situation as protestors and police surrounded the house of Lazaro Gonzalez where Elian was temporarily residing. Reno claims that the relatives rejected one workable solution after another--they were adamant that Elian would not go back to Cuba, and the Cuban community was behind them. It got bad fast. A Florida family court judge revoked Lazaro Gonzalez’s temporary custody, and on April 20 Reno engaged law enforcement how to determine the best time to go in and remove Elian from the house. Starting to hear warning bells? You should. After his cousin Marysleysis heard the decision, she said to a Justice Department official, “You think we just have cameras in the house? If people come in, they could be hurt.” Yeah. The Miami relatives were not all there. On April 22, in the pre-dawn hours, it all came crashing down as agents of the Border Patrol approached the house, knocked on the door, and entered when no one responded. Tear gas and pepper spray were employed against protestors outside who attempted to waylay them. In the confusion, an AP reporter named Alan Diaz was called into the house by the Miami family’s attorney, Armando Gutierrez, as well as Donato Dalrymple, one of the two men who had rescued Elian from the ocean (and a member of the exile community himself). Why did I tell you this? Because Diaz is responsible for taking the famous picture that’s at the head of this section--of the Border Patrol agent confronting Donato Dalrymple as he hid in a closet holding a crying Elian. It didn’t stop even after Elian was taken from the house. When TIME Magazine published an issue with a cover photo of Elian being happily reunited with his father at Andrews Air Force Base, titled “Papa!”, Newsweek chose to run that infamous photo taken by Alan Diaz and titled their issue “Seizing Elian”. Even now the Miami Gonzalezes tried to press their luck. They claimed that the Elian Gonzalez in the joyful reunion photo was a “fake”, and Sen. Bob Smith (R-NH) tried to escort the family onto the base, only to be turned away at the gate. loving Republicans and their virtue signaling. Elian and his father remained in the United States under close watch while the Miami relatives exhausted their legal options. A three-judge federal panel had ruled that he could not go back to Cuba until an asylum hearing took place, but this turned on the right of the relatives to request the hearing on his behalf--and Juan Miguel Gonzalez sure as hell wasn’t going to produce his son for such a thing. On June 1, 2000, the 11th Circuit Court reversed the ruling. Elian was too young to apply for asylum himself; only his father could do such a thing since the Miami family lacked legal standing. When the Supreme Court declined to hear the case on June 28, Elian was returned to Cuba. So where does Bill Clinton fit into all this? You might notice I haven’t mentioned his name once. Well, putting aside the fact that Janet Reno was his appointee, it’s widely speculated that the Elian Gonzalez affair may have cost Democrats the election. As we all know, the lovely, lovely Election of 2000 hinged on Florida, and Al Gore was the Democratic nominee that year. Gore had originally backed Republican legislation to give Elian and his father permanent residency, but he backtracked and supported Janet Reno’s decision to send them back instead later. It made the predominantly Republican Cuban community in Florida very upset, and Gore earned a great deal of ill will from both sides for attempting to equivocate on the subject. As for Elian, he joined the Young Communist Union of Cuba in 2008 after graduating junior high school, and he went to military school at 15. In November 2013, he described his time in the United States as “very sad times for me, which marked me for my whole life”. In 2015, he was studying to be an industrial engineer, and he graduated with a degree in the subject from the University of Matanzas. He now works at a state-run company that makes large plastic water tanks. Kind of a letdown, but at least he got a semi-normal life. The Postgame  After the incredibly hosed-up election in 2000, Bill Clinton left the Presidency and journeyed to New York, where he and Hillary had purchased a house in Westchester County (Chappaqua, to be exact). Hillary Clinton had run for Senate in New York in 2000 and won an easy victory, helped in no small part by the self-destruction of her opponent, Congressman Rick Lazio, and the campaign skills of her husband, who she continued to stand by even after the fallout from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Clinton stayed active. I’m not sure he could have done anything else. We know what he’s done--he’s traveled all over the world, done a myriad of speaking engagements, and opened a law office in Harlem in New York. After working diligently on behalf of numerous Senate and gubernatorial candidates in 2002, Clinton spoke for the fifth consecutive time at the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004, praising the candidate, then-U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-MA). He made a bundle from all the speeches, too. Earning between $100K and $300K per speech, most of which were given to corporations and philanthropic groups in North America and Europe, Clinton had amassed a tidy nest egg. The ethics reports Hillary was required to submit as a United States Senator showed that he’d earned more than $30 million between 2001 and 2005 just for doing paid speeches. By 2007, he’d earned more than $40 million, and his Presidential library, built in Little Rock, Arkansas, was dedicated on November 18, 2004. In September of 2005, the Clinton Global Initiative, funded by Clinton’s charity the Clinton Foundation, was born. The focus was to address global public health, alleviating world poverty, and putting a stop to religious and ethnic conflict. Noble goals, perhaps, but the foundation has received a number of questionable donations, such as money from the UAE, as well as the governments of Kuwait and Qatar--which is why Republicans today love to use it to bash the Clintons over the head. They allege that the Clintons used their influence with the government of Kazakhstan to illegally obtain mining contracts for a Canadian mining company, which in turn resulted in a $31 million dollar donation to their charity. Well, maybe, but the right has never offered any concrete proof, so… Oh, I should mention: in September of 2004, as he was campaigning for John Kerry, Clinton suffered an angina episode. For those of you not familiar, angina is extreme chest pain caused by an insufficient flow of blood to the heart--and its symptoms can mimic a heart attack very convincingly. It seemed that all the Big Macs and doughnuts had finally caught up to Clinton, and after being evaluated at Northern Westchester Hospital, he came back for an angiography--which revealed multiple vessel coronary artery disease. It meant that multiple blood vessels leading to the heart were obstructed and stopping the flow of blood. Clinton underwent a quadruple coronary artery bypass four days after the exam, and he received some chilling news from his medical team--if he hadn’t had the operation when he did, he likely would have suffered a massive heart attack within a few months. He went back onto the table the following March for a left pleural effusion--scar tissue and fluid in the left half of his chest cavity. The final straw was in 2010, when after complaining of chest pains, Clinton was rushed to the hospital and given two coronary artery stents. It was a wake-up call for a President who had shown no self-discipline when it came to food--he became a vegan. We know, of course, what Bill Clinton did on Hillary’s behalf in the 2008 Presidential campaign. His advocacy on her behalf was so vigorous that her primary opponent, then-Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL), often said he “did not know which Clinton he was running against”. Even former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R-MA), a contender for the Republican nomination, got in on the act, saying that he couldn’t “imagine Bill Clinton left with nothing to do in the White House”. We also know that it wasn’t all sunshine and roses. His advocacy for Hillary often led him to denigrate Obama in a fashion that was rather unacceptable, given Obama’s race. After Clinton heatedly dismissed the results of the South Carolina primary, where Obama won handily, by saying that black voters in the state had voted for Jesse Jackson in 1988, he drew widespread criticism. Many prominent black politicians felt he was tarnishing his own legacy by doing what he was doing. In fact, it’s argued that a conversation he had with Ted Kennedy, then the aged and ailing senior Senator from Massachusetts, left Kennedy so steamed that he endorsed Obama out of spite. Clinton asserted that someone like Obama “would have been getting us coffee a few years ago”, a line that apparently didn’t sit well with Kennedy. Anyway, we’re all in the unique position to know the rest of the story, since most of us are older than the age of twelve...so I think we can stop here. Most of us are familiar with the Clinton legacy, even if we weren’t old enough to vote when he was in office. Bill Clinton’s legacy is a mixed bag, as you have all figured out by now. He was a truly gifted politician and an incredibly smart, accomplished man, there’s no doubt about that. He possessed an instinct for leadership unrivaled by any of his contemporaries, a skill that enabled him to beat them out for the nomination in 1992. But his foibles--a penchant for dissembling, a lack of self-discipline, and a volcanic temper--have tempered enthusiasm for him somewhat. Nowadays, some historians have dropped him out of the top ten Presidents’ list of all time--of course, this is a heavily partisan opinion, but the general consensus was that Clinton was definitely in the upper echelon of Chief Executives. Let’s close with what I believe, since I don’t do that very often: my opinion of Bill Clinton is that he’s very much a creature and a product of his time and environment. There are very distinct reasons for why he became the man he became and why he governed the way he did. There’s not a whole lot of mystery--and honestly, I’d prefer it that way. A man without motives isn’t someone you can do anything with. ___ Hoo-wee! 38 pages. It’s even longer than my last update on Kennedy, and I didn’t cover everything I probably should have. Feedback is appreciated, of course. Fritz Coldcockin fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Mar 12, 2019 |
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Mar 12, 2019 01:47
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Thanks! Now I'm going to go read back on how Wilson royally hosed over Versailles. 
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Mar 12, 2019 06:38
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By the way, our winner? John Tyler, by a single vote. Andrew Jackson gets screwed by yet another corrupt bargain
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Mar 12, 2019 13:29
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It's nice to know my vote mattered.
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Mar 12, 2019 17:11
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you forgot this
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Mar 12, 2019 17:21
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luxury handset posted:you forgot this who likes short shorts BILL LIKES SHORT SHORTS also I can see Al Gore's dick
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Mar 12, 2019 17:39
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extremely powerful early 90's energy from that photo
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Mar 12, 2019 17:45
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Good write up, though skipping over Waco and Ruby Ridge feels a bit like a miss considering the role they played in setting the tone for the chaotic nature of Clinton's first term, and were the direct reason McVeigh blew up the Murrah building, but of course you can't hit everything. I still say Saturday Night Live had the best analysis of Bill. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYt0khR_ej0
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Mar 12, 2019 20:20
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howe_sam posted:Good write up, though skipping over Waco and Ruby Ridge feels a bit like a miss considering the role they played in setting the tone for the chaotic nature of Clinton's first term, and were the direct reason McVeigh blew up the Murrah building, but of course you can't hit everything. Waco lost out to Elian; sorry 
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Mar 13, 2019 00:44
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This is one of my all time favourite threads. Great job!
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Mar 18, 2019 21:27
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Jimmy Carter is now the oldest person to have served as POTUS, for people who care about that kind of trivia.
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Mar 21, 2019 17:47
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Ague Proof posted:Jimmy Carter is now the oldest person to have served as POTUS, for people who care about that kind of trivia. We really should give him back his peanut farm 
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Mar 21, 2019 17:48
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We allowed that fat orange shitfuck to keep all his hotels and business properties, but Jimmy Carter had to give up his peanut farm. There is no justice.
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Mar 21, 2019 17:54
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Ague Proof posted:Jimmy Carter is now the oldest person to have served as POTUS, for people who care about that kind of trivia. We should put him up for election again so that he can join Grover Cleveland in the non-consecutive terms club
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Mar 23, 2019 05:56
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whoa 3 updates in one go. great job fritz! i added the new posts to the op!
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Mar 23, 2019 06:38
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Don Gato posted:We should put him up for election again so that he can join Grover Cleveland in the non-consecutive terms club Then send him back in time to impregnate his mother so he can be his own father/son pair.
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Mar 23, 2019 12:36
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:We allowed that fat orange shitfuck to keep all his hotels and business properties, but Jimmy Carter had to give up his peanut farm. You People Made Me Give Up My Peanut Farm Before I Got To Be President.
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Mar 24, 2019 02:43
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Ken Burns’ Roosevelts documentary is on Netflix Shame on me for not knowing this existed
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Mar 24, 2019 03:34
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John Tyler, 10th President of the United States For most people, the most fascinating aspects of American history are the watershed moments. The Revolution, the Civil War, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the two World Wars, Vietnam, and the dawning of the new millennium are the signposts that many people will point to if you ask them which events they remember most from history class. For me, however, I think there’s another tier of events that are arguably just as influential on the nation’s development, especially in its early stages of life. At the center of one of these events was our next subject, John Tyler. Tyler is often in the bottom third of chief executives; mostly for the same reasons that many other antebellum one-termers don’t appear on the all-star list--no one remembers them. As a man and a President, Tyler is largely unremarkable. He was one more in a long line of chief executives between about 1840-1860 who failed to defuse the rising tensions between the North and the South. However, every serious student of American history should remember Tyler’s name because of the one major precedent he set: he settled the question, once and for all, how a Vice President should act when assuming the Presidency upon the death of his predecessor. Upon assuming office a mere 30 days after being elected, Tyler took swift and decisive control of his new position and let his Cabinet know that he was in charge. He was not the interim President or acting President, he was the President, with all the powers of the office. This is, unironically, one of the most important events in the nation’s early history, because future successors to the office had Tyler’s example to draw upon when their bosses died. Let’s talk about the life of this seemingly ordinary man who did something truly extraordinary. Plantation Born  John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790, in Charles City County, VA--which, incidentally, is where his running mate in 1840, William Henry Harrison, was from, believe it or not. It’s unclear where he was in terms of oldest/youngest sibling in his family--we don’t quite have solid birth and death dates for all of them, but 1790 seems to put Tyler on the younger end of his family, as there is only one confirmed birth after him, his sister Christianna. He was born into quite the pedigree--Tyler’s family could trace its lineage all the way back to Colonial Williamsburg. He also had friends in high places--his father, John Tyler Sr., was a friend and college roommate of Thomas Jefferson’s, and Tyler Sr. also served in Virginia’s House of Delegates alongside Benjamin Harrison V, the father of William Henry Harrison. Yeah, if you were to go back and look you’d see these weird missed connections all across American history. Isn’t it great? Tyler grew up in privilege, given that Dad would also go on to serve as Virginia’s governor and as a district court judge in Richmond. His home is depicted above; it was Greenway Plantation, a 1,200 acre estate that included a six-room manor house his father had constructed, and like all Southern aristocracy, the Tylers owned slaves--40, to be exact. Unlike most Southern plantations, however, the Tylers didn’t grow cotton--their chief products were mostly wheat, corn, and tobacco. Tyler himself was a frail boy, given to bouts of sickness--a plague that would continue to bother him into adulthood. His father, however, valued education--he used to pay tutors extra if they challenged the Tyler children academically. Tyler Senior, however, was all his children had. His wife Mary died of a stroke when young John was seven. At twelve, Tyler began his academic journey, entering the preparatory school of the College of William and Mary. Goddamn legacy admissions. Five years later he had graduated--and he’d become a very politically astute young man. His politics had been shaped by his new mentor, Bishop James Madison (no, not that James Madison; this James Madison was merely named as an homage). His favorite book was Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and he acquired a love of Shakespeare. His early life continues in a rather unremarkable fashion, believe it or not; Tyler joined his father’s law practice, then later joined up with former United States Attorney General Edmund Randolph. It was around then that he met this young lady:  Letitia Christian was the daughter of a prosperous Virginia planter and a member of the Virginia aristocracy, much like Tyler. They dated for five years--and Tyler was so abstemious that the first time he kissed Letitia was three weeks before he married her. Never doubt that he loved her, though: one of their only surviving love letters reads, “Whether I float or sink in the stream of fortune, you may be assured of this, that I will never cease to love you.” Awww. Unrelated fun fact: Tyler actually got accidentally admitted to the Virginia bar at 19. The presiding judge forgot to ask him how old he was. Tyler’s father was serving as governor by this point--so it was easy for him to start his own practice in Richmond. He used some of his family’s wealth to purchase Woodburn Plantation.  Yes, needless to say, it’s much bigger than his old house. Politics?  He got started early. In the year 1811, Tyler was 21, and he was in the Virginia House of Delegates, representing Charles City County, and he’d go on to serve five consecutive one-year terms after that. Tyler served on the Courts and Justice Committee--a natural fit, given his law background. If you were paying attention you could already see the political positions that would define him for the rest of his career beginning to take shape: Tyler was a strong supporter of what was then called “states’ rights” (it’s what we now call “the South’s bullshit excuse for slavery”) and stood in opposition to a national bank, voting to censure Virginia U.S. Senators William Branch Giles and Richard Brent for voting for the Bank’s recharter in 1816. When the War of 1812 began, Tyler, like most Americans, stood in strident opposition to British impressment of American soldiers and seizure of American ships. He, like most of his contemporaries, viewed these acts as blatant disrespect for our sovereignty. After the British seized Hampton, Virginia in 1813, Tyler was first to organize a militia company that he called the Charles City Rifles. He commanded them himself as Captain John Tyler, believe it or not. The Rifles were sent to defend the state capital, Richmond--but no British attack came, and Tyler dissolved them two months later. Ah well. Anyway, Tyler was given a land grant near what would eventually become Sioux City, Iowa as a reward for his “service”. He also became very rich. Tyler’s father died in 1813, and he inherited all 13 of his father’s remaining slaves as well as his father’s plantation house. In 1816 he left the legislature to serve on the Governor’s Council of State, a group of eight gubernatorial advisors elected by the Virginia General Assembly (we have this in Massachusetts too, except Governor’s Council members are directly elected). To The Mountain...And Back Again? So now what? Tyler was restless on the Governor’s Council, and he saw a chance to advance his career in late 1816 when Congressman John Clopton of the 23rd Virginia Congressional District died. Tyler was not yet thirty at the time, but he immediately filed papers to run for the seat, as did a friend of his, Andrew Stevenson (who, incidentally, would become Speaker of the House a couple decades down the road). If you want a modern-day parallel for this race, think Feinstein/De Leon in California last year: the two had nearly identical politics, so the race became a personality contest. Luckily for Tyler, he’d made lots of friends in the legislature, and five terms in the House of Delegates had forced him to hone his campaigning skills. He won, albeit narrowly, under the banner of what was then the Democratic-Republican Party--the party of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (it’s easier to think of early political parties as defined by their leaders more than their ideologies). I say this because the Democratic-Republicans were changing. After the War of 1812 and after Thomas Jefferson acted in such stark contrast as President to his espoused beliefs about small government, many in the party began advocating for a stronger central government. In fact, thanks to this about face, there was majority support in Congress for major infrastructure improvements, something that the party of “small government” would have been against in the past. Roads, shipping ports, and other public necessities were pushed, but Tyler wasn’t having any of it. No sir. He was a strict constructionist, rejecting all these ideas on both personal and Constitutional grounds. Basically, Tyler was that schmuck that the delegation from Georgia warned us about in the Second Continental Congress--the guy who will argue, with a straight face, that because a right is not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, the American government has no legal right to be proactive. These people are dumb and should be shunned, by the way. Tyler contended that “Virginia was not in so poor a condition as to require a charitable donation from Congress.” Why don’t you ask your constituents first, asswipe? Tyler got to participate in an audit of the Second Bank of the United States, too, in 1818--and we already know how he feels about central banks, unfortunately. He came back “appalled” by what he saw as “rampant corruption” within the bank’s bureaucracy. He argued vociferously for the bank’s charter to be revoked, but Congress wouldn’t have it. After getting elected to his own full term in early 1819 in Congress, Tyler joined the Sixteenth Congress, where the central question was admitting the state of Missouri to the Union. Doing so would upset the precious slave/free state balance, of course, so the question was: would slavery be permitted in the new state? Tyler himself was, at most, willing to acknowledge the moral ills of slavery (despite being a slaveowner himself), but you’d never hear him speak in favor of abolishing the institution. No, in fact, he was in favor of expanding it westward--using a sort of tortured logic wherein slave owners would move west and “thin the herd” in Virginia, making it easier to abolish slavery in the eastern colonies. Yeah, I don’t get it either, no matter how many times I read it. The lesson you need to take away, though, is that Tyler didn’t believe Congress had the power to regulate slavery--and admitting states based on this criteria was a recipe for “sectional conflict”. Tyler would spend the entirety of his time in Congress voting against bills that restricted slavery in the territories. If he only knew. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, anyhow, admitted Missouri as a slave state--but it also divested the northern-most part of Massachusetts and admitted Maine as a free state to balance it. Once again, the equilibrium was preserved, and the can was kicked down the road. Again. The new law also forbade slavery anywhere above the 36⁰ 30’ parallel, which is roughly the northern border of Arkansas. It was neat, clean and it made the problem go away...for now. In 1820, though, the dream died. Tyler declined to seek reelection. He was in poor health, for one, and he privately was expressing dissatisfaction with his position in the House--all his votes, he said, were symbolic gestures of opposition and they weren’t doing anything to change the culture in Washington. Plus, his Congressman’s salary wasn’t enough to fund his children’s education--he had three kids by this point with Letitia: Mary (born 1815), Robert (born 1816), and John III (born 1819). He’d go on, eventually to have four more for a total of seven (!): Letitia (1821), Elizabeth (1823), Alice (1827), and Tazewell (1830). Only Robert, John, and Letitia lived to a reasonably old age; the rest died in their 20s and 30s. Tyler left office quietly, endorsing his old friend Andrew Stevenson as his replacement, and returned to a full-time law practice. ...Nope, Back Up The Mountain Law didn’t hold the appeal it used to. After two years, Tyler was bored, so he decided to get back into politics. He sought a seat in the House of Delegates again, and since neither incumbent from Charles City County was running for reelection, Tyler coasted to victory, finishing first among the three candidates seeking two seats. Term started in December 1823, and the congressional nominating caucus, an early system used by the states for choosing Presidential candidates, was still in use in Virginia, despite the fact that it was rapidly going out of style elsewhere. Why does this matter? Well, you’re about to find out. That year, Tyler tried to get the lower House to endorse the caucus system of choosing a nominee and support Judge William H. Crawford for the nomination. By 1824, the two original parties, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, were rapidly splintering, and though Tyler got Crawford the lower House’s endorsement as the Democratic-Republican candidate, his proposal for the caucus system was soundly defeated. That was one of his only defeats, though. Tyler’s star began rising fast. He used his burgeoning influence to save the College of William and Mary from going under--some wanted to move it out of its original home in Williamsburg to Richmond, but Tyler instead proposed a series of administrative and financial changes that saved the school from disaster. By 1840, largely thanks to Tyler’s efforts, the school had reached record levels for enrollment. He was even considered as a candidate in the 1824 U.S. Senate election when the legislature met to choose a new Senator, but instead he was nominated in 1825 for governor of Virginia. This was not a directly elected position; it was chosen by the legislature, just like the Senate. He won election 131-81 over John Floyd--a name you might remember from axeil’s James Buchanan expose...he became a member of Buchanan’s lovely, lovely Cabinet™. The governorship in Virginia was more toothless then than the governorship in Texas is now. It didn’t even have veto power over the legislature; the original Virginia Constitution (in effect until 1830) had neutered it completely. Tyler enjoyed a very powerful political and oratorical bully pulpit, but he could not do much to influence the legislature. In fact, the most notable thing he did as Virginia’s governor was deliver Thomas Jefferson’s eulogy when the former President died on July 4, 1826. His eulogy was very well-received, needless to say. Tyler’s governorship was oddly reminiscent of his time in Congress--he vehemently opposed any expansion of federal power and was a proponent of “states’ rights” (again, read: the South’s bullshit excuse for owning people as property). He did, however, propose that Virginia expand its road system, and he did attempt another proposal at funding Virginia’s incredibly lovely and underfunded public school system. Needless to say, because antebellum Virginia was even shittier than post-war Virginia, no action on these fronts were taken. I know I have a bunch of Virginia natives among my readers, so axeil, friendbot, everyone, sorry, but your state was real poo poo back then. Tyler was about to get a promotion of sorts, though. In 1827, the legislature was trying to figure out whether or not they’d send this man back to the Senate for a full six-year term.  Sen. John Randolph was a very contentious figure in Virginia; he did hit the Southern g-spots for states’ rights and everything, but he was a rather Ted Cruz-esque figure in the Senate--not many people liked him and he said a lot of poo poo that made his colleagues uncomfortable, even his allies. Furthermore, he’d made enemies of the current President, John Quincy Adams, and the powerful Kentucky Senator, Henry Clay. If you were a Washington figure at the time, you didn’t want these guys to have your name on their poo poo lists. Not both of them, anyway. Anyway, the nationalist wing (the big government guys) of the Democratic-Republican party in Virginia were both Adams and Clay supporters (these guys would break away and eventually join the Whigs), and they constituted a sizable minority in the Virginia legislature. They needed someone to replace Randolph. Someone who could win votes from both factions--the nationalists and the others, who were already uncomfortable with Randolph’s antics. Figured out who they chose? Yeah. They promised Tyler he’d have their endorsement if he went after the nomination. Initially, Tyler said no. He endorsed Randolph. But as the days and weeks went by, Randolph kept acting like Abe Simpson in that “Old Man Yells At Cloud” picture, and the political pressure mounted to replace him. Tyler kept facing more and more calls to seek the seat. Finally, he caved. He said he’d accept it if the legislature chose him. It was a very close thing. One assemblyman argued that there was no political daylight between Tyler and Randolph; Tyler was simply the more agreeable person. Randolph’s supporters in the legislature contended that voting Tyler in would be tantamount to endorsing Adams and Clay. However, there were too many people that were either uncomfortable with Randolph’s antics or just outright didn’t like him. In a 115-110 vote, the legislature chose Tyler to replace John Randolph in the United States Senate. Senator Tyler The Maverick  Tyler was a Senator, but he was rapidly becoming a man without a party. In 1828 the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans were both no more. The Democratic-Republicans, in particular, had splintered into the National Republicans (Adams supporters) and Andrew Jackson’s new Democratic Party. The Presidential election of 1828 pitted them against each other once again, just as it had in 1824. For his part, Tyler didn’t like either of them. Both were in favor of expanding federal power, something that was anathema to supposed small-government conservatives like Tyler. However, he was increasingly drawn to the Democrats and Jackson, writing once “Turning to him I may at least indulge in hope, looking on Adams I must despair.” Drama queen. The Twentieth Congress was gaveled into session in December 1827, and true to form, Tyler remained a strict constructionist and conservative. He opposed all national infrastructure bills pushed by President Adams. Though these efforts were successful, he and his Southern colleagues were unable to stop the Tariff of 1828, known by Southerners as the Tariff of Abominations. It imposed a 38% tax on 92% of all imported goods--which kicked the everloving poo poo out of the Southern economy. The tariff was designed to protect Northern industry, but since the South did a great deal of trade with Great Britain, the cost of, oh, EVERYTHING increased hugely. Tyler’s opposition was strangely Theodore Rooseveltian in its vigor; he once said “they may strike the Federal Government out of existence by a word; demolish the Constitution and scatter its fragments to the winds”. I said it before but I feel like it bears repeating: Drama queen. Anyway, the election of 1828 resulted in Adams being unseated by Andrew Jackson, and the man that John Tyler had once vested a tiny amount of hope in quickly disappointed him. Jackson’s spoils system--wherein he awarded government jobs to friends, cronies and loyalists--in particular bothered Tyler, who decried it as an “electioneering weapon”. In protest, he began actively opposing Jackson’s nominees in Congress when they came up for a vote, believing many of them to be motivated by patronage or entirely unconstitutional by nature. This, guys...this was sacrilege. You didn’t oppose your party’s President. Tyler’s actions were considered an “act of insurgency” against his party. Particularly offended by Jackson’s abuse of the recess appointment to appoint treaty commissioners to meet with emissaries from the Ottoman Empire, Tyler introduced a bill in the Senate that would formally chastise Jackson. He was John McCain before John McCain (yes, I know McCain wasn’t really a maverick; no multipage discussions on the subject please). That isn’t to say that Tyler was entirely opposed to everything Jackson did, of course. He did vote to confirm several of the President’s appointees, including Jackson’s future 1832 running mate, Martin Van Buren, as ambassador to Great Britain (or minister to Britain as it was known then). Additionally, his previous support for revoking the national bank’s charter made him a natural ally of Jackson’s in 1832, when the main issue was the recharter of the Bank of the United States. Its chairman, Nicholas Biddle, was Jackson’s bete noire--and when Congress voted to recharter the Bank, Jackson sent it back with an angry veto, something Tyler supported wholeheartedly. In the end he’d endorse Jackson for reelection in 1832, like all Democrats did. The uneasy relationship he had with the party didn’t go away, though. In November 1832, the Nullification Crisis began. For those of you who aren’t up on your American history, the Nullification Crisis began when South Carolina (because who else) passed an Ordinance of Nullification through their state legislature, declaring the so-called Tariff of Abominations null and void. Needless to say, this was a big deal. State law could not supercede existing federal law. What did Andrew Jackson do? Well, he did the one good thing he’d do in his entire eight years in office. Jackson angrily denied that South Carolina had a right to do anything of the sort--states could not nullify federal laws, he said, and he threatened to send federal troops to South Carolina to enforce the tariff. He even went so far as to threaten the entire Congressional delegation from South Carolina with hanging--including his own Vice President and chief instigator of this whole mess.  That loving hair. John C. Calhoun was basically Donald Trump circa 1830-1840, only slightly more articulate. A Congressional firebrand and ardent defender of “states’ rights” (do I have to say it again?), Calhoun was matched with Jackson on the Democratic ticket in both 1828 and 1832, but the sumbitch ended up resigning his office in December 1832 over the nullification issue. Martin Van Buren replaced him after he was recalled from Great Britain. Jackson was very clear about what he believed on this issue. Issuing a proclamation to South Carolina and any other state thinking of passing a nullification ordinance, he said “Disunion by armed force is treason. Are you ready to incur its guilt?” For his part, Tyler was very opposed to Jackson’s response. He sympathized with South Carolina, rejecting Jackson’s use of military force against a single state. Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, lived up to his name and came up with the Compromise Tariff, which would gradually reduce the so-called Tariff of Abominations over the period of a decade. Tyler supported the move, which ratcheted down the tensions between the states and the federal government and defused the crisis...at least temporarily, anyway. Tyler knew that he’d made enemies back home, too. Voting against the Force Bill (the new law that gave Jackson the power to enforce federal law with the use of federal troops) had permanently pissed off the Jacksonians back in the Virginia legislature. These guys were already uneasy over Tyler’s less-than-stellar record of supporting his President, and as such they put up a competitor, the pro-Jackson Democrat James McDowell, in 1833 when the legislature reconvened. It was only the endorsement of Henry Clay that saved Tyler’s political life--he won reelection by a mere 12 votes. The endorsement from Clay, the titular head of the newly-formed Whig Party, meant that Tyler’s days as a nominal Democrat were numbered. When Jackson moved to dissolve the Bank of the United States via executive fiat, directing Treasury Secretary Roger Taney (yes, that Roger Taney, of Dred Scott infamy) to transfer federal funds from the Bank to state-chartered banks right away, Tyler’s patience ran out. He called it a “flagrant assumption of power”, a breach of contract, and a threat to the economy. Voting for two resolutions of censure in the Senate, Tyler declared himself a Whig, which instantly made him one of Jackson’s enemies. Bad timing. The Democrats had control of the Virginia House of Delegates, and they were telling him to vote for Sen. Thomas Hart Benton (D-MO)’s resolution that expunged the censure from the Congressional record. For those of you not familiar with what this means, Jackson was essentially erasing the censure from the time stream--as though it had never happened. Tyler refused to vote for it. He felt it would be a violation of his principles. He submitted a letter of resignation to Vice President Martin Van Buren on February 29, 1836, which said in part: quote:I shall carry with me into retirement the principles which I brought with me into public life, and by the surrender of the high station to which I was called by the voice of the people of Virginia, I shall set an example to my children which shall teach them to regard as nothing place and office, when either is to be attained or held at the sacrifice of honor. Guy really fancied himself Cicero reborn, didn’t he? Still No Peace And loving Quiet Tyler had gone home with every intention of focusing on his wife and family, but the Presidential election of 1836 beckoned. The Whigs were looking at him as potential Vice Presidential candidate on their 1836 ticket, in which Jackson’s handpicked successor, Martin Van Buren, was almost certain to be their opponent. On the same day that Virginia Democrats issued the instruction to vote for expunging the censure to Tyler’s replacement in the Senate, the Virginia Whigs nominated him as their favorite son candidate for the second spot. Why only a favorite son? Because the Whigs were so hilariously disorganized in 1836 that they didn’t have a national convention. Instead, various regional parties put forth their own tickets--New England, for example, nominated Daniel Webster and Congressman Francis Granger. The middle and lower South gravitated to Tennessee Senator Hugh Lawson White as their Presidential candidate--and they put up Tyler as his running mate. The Whigs wanted to deny Van Buren a majority in the Electoral College and throw the election to the House of Representatives, where they had control and deals could be made. It didn’t work. Factionalization like this never does. Tyler, despite his hopes that he’d be one of the top two vote-getters and the Senate would have to choose between him and another candidate for the Vice Presidency (under the Twelfth Amendment), only got 47 electoral votes--Georgia, South Carolina, and Tennessee chose him, but even his home state rejected him. Van Buren and his running mate, Richard Mentor Johnson, carried the election. And even then he couldn’t get any peace and loving quiet. He’d planned, after losing the 1836 election, to return to practicing law full-time, but again, he remained bored in a law office. Tyler did what he’d done twice already: he sought a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates, which he won easily. This time was different, though. He was a national figure now, and his successor in the Senate, William Cabell Rives, had, like Tyler, drifted away from the Democratic Party and had been signaling a possible alliance with the Whigs. The early Democrats were like the worst club ever. No one wanted to stay on as a member. What did Tyler do? He seized the day and went for the seat again, of course. He expected Virginia’s Whigs to support him--but unluckily for him, they had hoped to ally with Virginia’s more conservative Democrats in 1840 to elect a successful Presidential candidates. They thought Rives a more expedient choice. This strategy got the endorsement of Henry Clay, who, despite his friendship with Tyler, felt that 1840 was too important to jeopardize. Dick. Anyway, Virginia’s lower house couldn’t agree on a candidate. There were three candidates in the race, and none of them could get a majority. The deadlock persisted for nearly two years until January of 1841. The Presidential Election of 1840  Let’s set the scene here first. After four years in the office, Martin Van Buren was not popular, folks. The Panic of 1837 had put the United States in the grip of a serious recession, most of which was brought on by Andrew Jackson’s boneheaded economic policy. Turns out blowing up the national bank just because you don’t like the guy running it has some far-reaching consequences. Anyway, he’d hosed up the economy something fierce, and the once-popular Van Buren, who’d been mostly riding Jackson’s coattails, now found himself the fall guy for Jackson’s policies. The Whigs smelled blood in the water. At the national convention in 1839 in Harrisburg, PA, all the delegates knew that whoever the head of their ticket was would most likely end up as the next President, so naturally, the party’s heaviest hitters all threw their hats into the ring.  You know him already. Henry Clay, Kentucky Senator and the “Great Compromiser”, had enjoyed a long and storied career in Congress. He’d been the architect of the Missouri Compromise and he’d also been at the center of what Jackson’s people called the “corrupt bargain” that threw the 1824 election to John Quincy Adams.  You also know him, albeit from previous biographies of mine. This is General Winfield Scott, hero of the Black Hawk War and the man in charge of the federal troops that Jackson had sent to South Carolina during the Nullification Crisis. He was also a very prominent Whig. However, he was also the general in charge during the massacre of the Seminole Indians in December 1835 in Central Florida. So yeah...he’s almost as much of a dick as Andrew Jackson. The final major competitor, however, was this man.  William Henry Harrison was better known as the “Hero of Tippecanoe” or “Old Tippecanoe”, for a battle that had taken place in November 1811 against the Shawnee Indians. After a series of ill-fated peace negotiations, the tribes had launched a surprise attack early in the morning of November 7, and for Harrison’s efforts he became a national hero (although it’s worth mentioning that he vastly outnumbered the Shawnee and his troops took way more casualties…). As for his politics, he was nominally a Whig, but much less strident in terms of political ambition than Scott. For Tyler’s part, he attended the convention, but simply as a delegate from Virginia. There’d been so much bitterness over the unresolved Senate election that Virginia refused to make him their favorite son candidate for the vice presidency again. Tyler himself was rooting for Clay to win the nomination--despite the fact that he knew that this meant that he probably would not be chosen as the Vice President (due to geographical balance). The convention deadlocked quickly. Virginia voted for Clay, incidentally, but Northern Whigs were vehemently opposed to him, and Southern Whigs opposed Scott after Pennsylvania’s Thaddeus Stevens (a name you will see pop up with alarming regularity in Civil War-era American history) read a letter to the Virginia delegation wherein he displayed abolitionist sentiments. Being that they were one of the largest and most influential delegations in the room, Virginia announced that General Harrison was their second choice--causing a stampede to Harrison’s banner on the next ballot. Scott’s supporters deserted him for Harrison in droves, putting him over the top and winning him the nomination. As for the Vice Presidential nomination, it was still 1839 and the office was still considered largely immaterial. No one had yet failed to finish an elected term in office. As such, it’s not clear how Tyler won the spot. Accounts differ--biographer Oliver Chitwood points out that Tyler was a natural choice to balance the Ohio-born Harrison, as he was a Southerner, a Whig, and a slave owner, as well as an outspoken opponent of Andrew Jackson. Other biographers like Robert Seager agree: “He was put on the ticket to draw the South to Harrison. No more, no less.” New York publisher and political bigwig Thurlow Weed said that Tyler was only given the job because they couldn’t get anyone else to take it--of course, one needs to take this with an enormous grain of salt because Weed said it after Tyler’s break with the Whigs four years later. Anyway, worth mentioning: Virginia was still so salty at Tyler that they abstained when his name was submitted in the balloting--but he got the required majority to win anyway. The Whigs weren’t taking any chances. The party didn’t even draw up an official platform--they knew that doing so would tear their fragile coalition apart, so instead they just ran on “Hey, we’re not the guys who renominated Martin Van Buren!” Campaigns like this worked in an age where information was only disseminated via newspaper and word of mouth, especially when political parties had a great deal of control over news publications. Official campaign literature praised Tyler for quitting the Senate rather than vote to expunge Jackson’s censure, for example. The party wanted to keep Harrison and Tyler quiet, however, for fear that one of them would say something that alienated the disparate segments of the party. I mean, if you’re afraid that letting your candidate talk will lose you the election...maybe your problems run much deeper than the candidate? Anyway, this rule didn’t last. When Van Buren’s Vice President, Richard Mentor Johnson, did a very successful speaking tour on Van Buren’s behalf, Tyler was pressed into service. He was sent to Columbus, Ohio, to assure Northern Whigs that he did indeed share Harrison’s political views--but he could not avoid questions...or hecklers. He was, in fact, goaded into admitting that he’d supported the Compromise Tariff (something most Whigs had not), and from then on stuck to quoting from Harrison’s vague stump speeches. At Columbus, Tyler did not talk about the Bank of the United States at all--and that was the most pressing issue of the day. This was not a courageous campaign. It was, however, the first of its kind--where style was prioritized well over substance. The Whigs knew they had to create a movement that spanned the country, so they avoided issues and won with things like torchlight processions and alcohol-fueled rallies. You know, I’m REALLY glad they can’t do that poo poo anymore, because the only thing that would make Trump’s rallies worse would be the addition of warm Bud Light. Anyway, the Democrats made a tactical error when they depicted Harrison as a tired old soldier (he was 68) who would quit his campaign if given a barrel of hard cider to drink in his log cabin. The Whigs seized on this, and the myth of the log cabin was born. Instantly, the well-to-do Harrison who had grown up in comfort and privilege became a hard-bitten frontiersman, born in a log cabin and preferring hard cider, the drink of the “common man”, as opposed to the “effeminate” Van Buren.  The eerie parallels to Bush 2000 and 2004 are very apparent, aren’t they? That wasn’t all. Harrison’s military service was trumpeted across the nation in Whig newspapers and campaign literature, inspiring the campaign jingle that all of you are familiar with, “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too”. quote:What has caused this great commotion, ...hey, I didn’t write it, so don’t blame me. “Van”, of course, refers to Van Buren. As historian Louis Hatch says, “the Whigs roared, sang, and hard-cidered the ‘hero of Tippecanoe’ into the White House”. Oh, did I not mention that? Yeah, Harrison and Tyler won the election in overwhelming fashion. Van Buren, though he campaigned valiantly, never really had a chance. He was a victim of circumstance.  Notice that Virginia voted for Van Buren. This embarrassed Tyler personally, but the Whigs won every other large electoral prize of note and took 53% of the popular vote, as well as control of both houses of Congress. The Long, Storied, Consequential Vice Presidency of John Tyler Tyler returned to his home in Williamsburg, Virginia after the election, staying quiet as Harrison was besieged by office-seekers. He didn’t participate at all in Cabinet selection, but Harrison did seek his advice a few times when trying to figure out whether he should fire a Van Buren appointee. Tyler always recommended against termination, and Harrison took his advice, writing, “Mr. Tyler says they ought not to be removed, and I will not remove them.” Harrison and Tyler met once more in February during a parade in Richmond, but they didn’t talk about politics at all. On March 4, 1841, Tyler was sworn in in the Senate chamber, and he gave a quick three-minute speech about “states’ rights” (again, do I have to say it?) before performing his duties as Vice President--namely, swearing in the new Senators and gaveling the chamber to order before leaving to attend his boss’ inauguration. After it was over, Tyler returned to the Senate to receive Harrison’s Cabinet nominations and to preside over their confirmation votes. Then he left Washington, quietly returning to Williamsburg. He expected to have few responsibilities for the next four years. And he might have, if Harrison had followed his example and made his inauguration speech as brief as Tyler’s. Unfortunately, Harrison had spoken for two hours after being inaugurated on a cold, drizzly March day, without an overcoat, in a vain effort to prove he wasn’t the frail old man the Democrats had painted him as. The first few weeks of the job took a severe toll on Harrison’s health, and in mid-to-late March he caught pneumonia when he got stuck outside during a rainstorm. He deteriorated quickly. On April 1, Daniel Webster informed Tyler that Harrison was ill; and two days later, Richmond lawyer James Lyons wrote Tyler that Harrison had taken a turn for the worse. At dawn, on April 5, 1841, literally one month and one day after Harrison and Tyler were sworn in, Chief Clerk of the State Department Fletcher Webster (son of Daniel Webster) approached Tyler’s plantation and found the Vice President shooting marbles with his children. He delivered the news: William Henry Harrison was dead.  “His Accidency” All hell broke loose in Washington. In the 50-year history of the country, this had never happened. People began rioting in the streets, looting stores and hoarding food and preparing for the apocalypse. Wait *checks notes*. Sorry, that’s not what happened. Still, it was bad. Sure, we’d written something into the Constitution for an event like this, but it was still jarring to have to use it. Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 was very clear: quote:In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President.... In plain English, it means that if the President dies, leaves office, or is no longer able to perform his duties, the Vice President becomes President. The problem is that it’s still open to interpretation, no matter how specific it might read to you and me--we have more than 200 years of history to draw on, including several Presidential deaths and assassinations that act as precedent. Tyler did not have the benefit of any of this. As a result, Harrison’s Cabinet convened within the hour and determined amongst themselves that Tyler would be “Vice President, Acting President”, that is, he’d have the office’s powers and responsibilities, but he would not be given the title of “President”. This is one of those watershed moments in American history where everything that came after could have been very different, had Tyler meekly accepted this characterization. He did not. He told the Cabinet in very unequivocal and forceful language that he was the President now, without any qualifications or restrictions on the title, because the Constitution had conferred upon him the powers of the office when Harrison had died. Honestly, I think Harrison’s Cabinet was so startled that they did not protest Tyler’s decision. The Presidential oath of office was administered by a local judge in Tyler’s DC hotel room, a move that Tyler felt would quell any doubt as to the legitimacy of his succession. At 51, he was, to this date, the youngest man to occupy the Oval Office. Though Harrison’s Cabinet did not protest Tyler’s full assumption of the office, they still attempted to exert undue authority over him. Tyler had elected to keep on Harrison’s full Cabinet for fear of alienating his supporters and dividing the country at a time when he needed it united. At his first Cabinet meeting, however, Secretary of State Daniel Webster informed Tyler that Harrison had instituted a practice of making policy by majority vote during these meetings. This was a lie, of course. Harrison had been President for a month--he’d barely had time to have Cabinet meetings, what with all the “being deathly ill” stuff. Still, Webster thought he could bluff Tyler--and as such was astounded when Tyler rebuffed him. quote:I beg your pardon, gentlemen; I am very glad to have in my Cabinet such able statesmen as you have proved yourselves to be. And I shall be pleased to avail myself of your counsel and advice. But I can never consent to being dictated to as to what I shall or shall not do. I, as president, shall be responsible for my administration. I hope to have your hearty co-operation in carrying out its measures. So long as you see fit to do this, I shall be glad to have you with me. When you think otherwise, your resignations will be accepted. In other words? “I’m happy to take your advice and counsel, but I make the decisions, not you--and you can either stand with me or you can leave.” Guys, I cannot overstate how important Tyler’s actions were. He set a definitive precedent for Vice Presidents who ascend to the office when the President dies. He made sure that his Cabinet--and indeed, the whole country--knew that he was the President, not the Acting President or just the President until new emergency elections could be held. Still, the method by which he had attained the office earned him a new nickname in America’s newspapers: “His Accidency”. It didn’t change the fact that the “accidental President” had already made his own mark on history...and he wasn’t done yet. End of Part 1. I really thought I was gonna get this all done in one fell swoop, but it turns out Tyler’s life is a bit more consequential than I thought. I also wanna see if anyone’s still paying attention. Next time, we discuss his Presidency.
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Apr 9, 2019 14:12
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This thread has been a fascinating look into history and I'm so glad it's still alive!
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Apr 9, 2019 14:54
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Just letting you know I mostly abandoned D&D but you still have my attention if you want to keep talking about presidents.
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Apr 9, 2019 15:00
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Fritz Coldcockin posted:What has caused this great commotion, You can hear the entire campaign song on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjog6n8rUQ4 quote:Needless to say, because antebellum Virginia was even shittier than post-war Virginia, no action on these fronts were taken. I know I have a bunch of Virginia natives among my readers, so axeil, friendbot, everyone, sorry, but your state was real poo poo back then. I was born and raised in Virginia. I love my state, but I don't have any illusions about the fact that only within the past twenty (?) years or so have we begun to join the modern world in many ways. Considering the recent blackface and Charlottesville Lee statue controversies, we still have a ways to go.
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Apr 9, 2019 17:01
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That was super interesting, as a dirty foreigner I doubt I'd ever even heard of the guy before!
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Apr 9, 2019 17:26
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Every new post gets read with interest. Thanks! My feeling is this thread isn't really for making GBS threads up with moot commentary. I'm really enjoying this thread. Just because it's silent for a while doesn't mean we left.
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Apr 9, 2019 20:50
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relevant to this thread's interests https://twitter.com/BeschlossDC/status/1120034580759707648
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Apr 21, 2019 21:09
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I finally got around to reading the John Tyler update. It was great! And I make no apologies for the history of Virginia, it's insanely poo poo and racist until the early 2000s.
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Apr 23, 2019 19:40
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axeil posted:And I make no apologies for the history of Virginia, it's insanely poo poo and racist until the early 2000s. 
frankenfreak fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Apr 24, 2019 |
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Apr 24, 2019 02:01
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frankenfreak posted:It's 2019 and Virginia has a governor who did blackface. And he was the "liberal" one.
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Apr 24, 2019 05:16
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Part 2: The Accidental President When we last left John Tyler, this rather unremarkable career politician from Virginia had made history. He was the first Vice President to assume the Presidency upon the death of his predecessor, and he did so in swift, decisive fashion. Despite attempts by William Henry Harrison’s Cabinet to assert their authority over him, Tyler’s strict constructionist interpretation of Article II, Section 1, clause 6 of the United States Constitution led him to one inescapable conclusion: with Harrison’s death, he was the President. Not the Acting President, but the President, with all the honors, duties, and responsibilities that come with the job. It is thanks to Tyler that the future occupants of the Vice Presidency can rest easy on this one precedent. ...That said, however, Tyler’s actual Presidency? Rather turbulent, mostly unremarkable in terms of achievements, and ultimately it just did not end well for anyone involved. So pull up a chair, pop some popcorn, and I’ll explain. Day One As I discussed in my previous update, Tyler moved quickly upon Harrison’s death to assert his authority. In addition to having the Oath of Office administered in his DC hotel room (a move Tyler felt would dispel any doubt over his succession), he kept Harrison’s Cabinet intact...but gave them no illusions as to who was in charge. Well, guess who had a problem with that.  He’s like the bad penny of the antebellum years sometimes. Henry Clay, as you’ll all remember, was Tyler’s former boss in the Senate and the leader of the Whigs pre-Harrison. Now that Tyler was President, that made him the de facto leader of the Whig Party--something Clay was not prepared to surrender. Clay had been looking forward to being the “man behind the curtain” in a Harrison administration--and now that Harrison was dead, his plans still had not changed. He figured that Tyler would be little more than a figurehead--his Presidency a mere “regency”, as Clay put it. Clay wasn’t alone in his beliefs. Massachusetts Congressman and former President John Quincy Adams felt that Tyler should act as caretaker, under the title “Acting President”--or just stay as the Vice President, even as Tyler delivered his own inaugural address to Congress on April 9, wherein he reasserted his belief in limited federal power and what he called “Jeffersonian democracy” (a catchall term that really just referred to whatever anyone wanted it to be; this term had no practical meaning). Remember, folks: John Tyler wasn’t a traditional Whig. Remember how he got here? He wasn’t drawn to the Whig Party due to his belief in a strong central government or a personal admiration for Henry Clay or John Quincy Adams. He had walked backwards into the party out of a deep dislike and distrust for the man who stood in opposition to it: Andrew Jackson. What’s more, he’d alienated his own state party, so much so that they’d refused to endorse him for Vice President at their convention...and the state had gone for Martin Van Buren in the election. The point is that Tyler had few friends in the political party he called home. Spoiler alert: he would not do anything to make it easier on himself, and his opponents would never, EVER accept him as President. Not completely anyway. Nevertheless, Tyler never wavered in his own personal conviction that the Constitution granted him the title and the authority conferred upon the President. In fact, when Congress sent correspondence to the White House that was addressed to the “Vice President” or the “Acting President”, Tyler told his clerks to return it unopened. Do not feel bad if you are feeling a grudging admiration for the man, on this front at least. It was an important hill for Tyler to plant a flag on. Expelled!  So you start here, knowing that Tyler didn’t have a whole lot of friends in Congress. The Whigs barely trusted him and the Democrats didn’t like him due to his dislike of Andrew Jackson. When Harrison had been elected, the Whigs had expected him to push Whig policies and defer to party Congressional leaders, such as Clay and Adams. Initially, Tyler followed suit on a few measures, such as the Preemption Act of 1841, which granted “squatters’ sovereignty” to settlers on public land, a new bankruptcy law, and the repeal of the Independent Treasury (the mechanism, signed into law in 1840, was used by President Martin Van Buren as a palliative measure for the economic panic of 1837...it was a central bank by any other name, thought to take the politics out of monetary policy). The honeymoon didn’t last. Remember, Tyler didn’t believe in a strong executive--and when Clay brought him a bill for a national banking act (which would restore the Bank of the United States), Tyler vetoed it. He’d do so twice, even though the second version was retooled to address some of his professed concerns with the first version, as the final version did not--several poison pill amendments had been inserted at the last minute. Tyler was having none of it. He knew that Clay was trying to kneecap him for the 1844 elections--to ensure that he wouldn’t have to contend with a successful incumbent Whig President. The fight got a little ugly. On September 11, 1841, the Cabinet marched into Tyler’s office one by one and resigned after Tyler’s second veto of the banking bill. They thought that by doing so, Tyler would be so intimidated that he’d offer to resign--and in doing so, Senate President pro tempore, Samuel L. Southard (W-NJ) would become President. This was yet another carefully constructed bit of theater from Henry Clay. The only member of the Cabinet who stayed was Secretary of State Daniel Webster--he was negotiating what would eventually become known as the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842...but more on that later. When Webster told Tyler that he was willing to stay, Tyler said, “Give me your hand on that, and now I will say to you that Henry Clay is a doomed man.” Oh, it is on. On September 13, however, the Whigs had reached their breaking point. Tyler refused to give in to their demands, so the Whig Congressional delegations met and expelled Tyler from their party. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, it’s literally exactly what it sounds like--they kicked the President of the United States out of their clubhouse. He was no longer a Whig and he could not take advantage of any party funds or campaign apparatus. This was not as huge a deal in 1841 as it would be today--imagine the GOP expelling Trump (as they should have) or the Democrats kicking out Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama--but it is still the only time in history a President has managed to get the boot from his own party. The fallout got real bad, too: Tyler was absolutely savaged by Whig-leaning newspapers and he got hundreds of death threats. He’d managed to make Congressional Whigs so angry, in fact, that they refused to allocate money to fix the now-dilapidated White House (it was in tough shape by 1841). Tyler’s Presidency was fatally hamstrung. When you’re a man without a party, your chance to make your mark on the office is severely limited--after all, as Jimmy Carter learned, if you don’t have allies, you don’t have a chance. We’re going to talk briefly about a couple of the major events of the Tyler years, though--I didn’t bring you here just to talk about the succession, after all. Money, Problems, Etc. I realize this is a familiar refrain, but I am terrible at talking about money, so bear with me. By mid-1841 we still hadn’t really recovered from the Panic of 1837, and the government faced a gigantic budget deficit (relatively) of nearly $11 million. As the nominally Whig President, Tyler recognized a need for higher tariffs--but remember, he’d supported the Compromise Tariff in the early 1830s. Tyler wanted to cap any new import taxes at around 20%. He signed the Distribution Act of 1841 putting a ceiling on tariffs at 20%, but despite these measures by March 1842 we were still kind of in the poo poo. The Distribution Act was, ostensibly, to collect money for the nationwide infrastructure improvement program the Whigs supported. See, the North liked the tariffs. They protected industry. The South, on the other hand, had no industrial base and needed an open-access market to Britain for their cotton. Nevertheless, the Whig Congress didn't want to raise tariffs in a way that would affect the distribution of funds to states. So, in June 1842 they passed two bills that both raised tariffs and unconditionally extended the Distribution Act. The result? Tyler vetoed the bills. When Congress tried again and combined both bills into one, Tyler vetoed again. Some action was clearly necessary, however, and in August 1842 the Tariff of 1842 became law by one vote in both houses of Congress. It restored tariffs to pre-Compromise levels and ended the distribution program. A separate bill to restore the Distribution Act was pocket-vetoed by Tyler. The story doesn’t end here. See, the Whigs were mad. Real mad. They were so angry that Tyler wasn’t acceding to their wishes and pushing Whig policies, in fact, that they initiated impeachment proceedings. Their argument was that Tyler was issuing vetoes based on ill will towards Congress, not because of constitutionality (or lack thereof). The Whigs, led by Congressman John Botts of Virginia, charged that Tyler was unlawfully interfering with Congress’ presumed authority to make policy, and they recommended a nine-member committee to “investigate” his behavior. Henry Clay, however, in true Great Compromiser fashion, found the measure “too aggressive”. The Botts resolution was defeated in the House, 127 to 83--but it was not a clear indicator of who would and would not favor Tyler’s removal from office. I told you the guy had enemies. The enmity between Tyler and the Whig-controlled Congress only grew. In August 1842, as the vetoes from the tariffs came down, a House select committee chaired by John Quincy Adams condemned Tyler’s use of the veto and viciously attacked his character. Adams, understandably, detested slaveholders--he, like his father, was an ardent abolitionist. The House endorsed the committee’s recommendation to change the requirement for overriding vetoes from a two-thirds majority to a simple majority, but they could not get a majority to approve this in either house of Congress. They were unable to continue pursuing punitive measures for Tyler after the 1842 midterms anyway; they kept the Senate after that election, but lost the House to the Democrats. Foreign (and Domestic) Affairs  One of the things that Tyler’s administration was good at, in stark contrast to his difficulties in domestic affairs, was foreign policy. In the early-to-mid 1840s, we were in the throes of what is now called “Manifest Destiny”--the belief that America was divinely or otherwise ordained to stretch from the Eastern to the Western coast of the continent. We were continually expanding westward--something that repeatedly inflamed the slavery-based tensions inherent between North and South. Nevertheless, Tyler experienced some success on these fronts largely because his views on national expansion mirrored those of most Americans. He negotiated the Treaty of Wanghia with China in 1844 in order to make the United States a major player in Pacific trade markets, and his Minister to Berlin, Henry Wheaton, signed a trade agreement with the Zollverein, the coalition of German states. Of course, the Whigs, still angry over Tyler’s machinations with the tariffs, rejected the treaty just to show Tyler how much they hated him. Perhaps the biggest foreign policy achievement of the Tyler administration, however, was something I mentioned a bit further up: the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of 1842. Named for Secretary of State Daniel Webster, the treaty was the final determination on the border between Maine and Canada--an issue that had nearly driven the United States and Britain to the brink of war on numerous occasions. One last thing worth mentioning (despite the fact that it isn’t really “foreign”) is the Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island in 1842. The Dorr Rebellion was basically a USPOL wet dream. During the antebellum era, Rhode Island was dominated by its rural enclaves--it calculated legislature representation by towns, so the city populations were hilariously disenfranchised. Consequently, the immigrant populations in Rhode Island’s urban areas were denied the right to vote and city infrastructure lagged badly behind neighboring states’. By 1829, the state somehow managed to disenfranchise nearly 60% of its free white men--most of whom were Irish Catholic immigrants or other Roman Catholics who lived and worked in the cities. So, in 1840, the Rhode Island Suffrage Association was formed, with state legislator Thomas Wilson Dorr at its head. The group held meetings and brought their case to the state legislature, but the legislature refused to listen. So the “Dorrites”, as they were now known, formed their own “People’s Party”. They held a constitutional convention and drew up a brand-new Rhode Island state Constitution and submitted it to a vote. It was overwhelmingly approved by nearly 13,000 votes, but the existing state government refused to acknowledge any of this as legal. Consequently, in 1842, there were two gubernatorial elections in the state: the one recognized by the legislature, and the one that elected Thomas Dorr as Governor. I should mention this was not a bloody “smash the state” rebellion. No attempts were made to take over the state house or the machinery of government. Both Dorr and his counterpart, Samuel Ward King, issued proclamations, and Ward appealed to Tyler’s administration for federal aid in squashing the “insurgents”. Dorr appealed to Tyler for legitimacy. Neither were granted their requests, but Tyler did promise that if the rebellion got physical, he wouldn’t hesitate to send troops to stop it. He recommended that Rhode Island overhaul its legislative system to re-enfranchise those who had been silenced, however, and thus quell the Dorr Rebellion’s reason for existing. The Dorr Rebellion didn’t end well for Dorr or his supporters. When the RI state militia was mustered to stop them, Dorr and his allies fled the state, and when Dorr himself returned a few years later, he was arrested and charged with treason, sentenced to confinement and hard labor for life, and died a broken man in 1851. It did, however, lead to that overhaul of voting rights--so it wasn’t a total loss. Interlude: Julia I just realized that in around 20 pages on Tyler I spent maybe a paragraph talking about Letitia Tyler, his wife--but we get to talk about her here, mostly because, unfortunately, she died. Yup. In 1839, the lovely Letitia Tyler suffered a massive paralytic stroke that left her an invalid. She stayed almost entirely out of the limelight during Tyler’s Presidency, descending only once from the upstairs living quarters of the White House to attend the wedding of her daughter, Elizabeth, in January 1842. Eight months later, Letitia was dead. Mercifully, she did not see any of her children die--remember, the couple only had three children live to old age. The marriage had been a happy one, and her death left Tyler bereft and devastated...but the seeds had already been planted in January 1842 for his comeback.  Fun fact: that's the first known PHOTO of a First Lady. Anyway, the 21-year-old Julia Gardiner had met President Tyler, then 52, at a White House reception. From the moment he met her, Tyler was enchanted--but Julia wasn’t. She initially wanted nothing to do with him. She was high-spirited and independent-minded, and Tyler was quiet, grave, and very reserved--something that didn’t endear him to Julia. When he proposed to her in February 1843, she shot him down. Repeatedly. He kept trying and she kept saying no. We call this “stalking” now. Dunno what they called it in the 1840s. Then things changed--later that year, Julia’s father David died during a Presidential excursion aboard the new steam frigate Princeton. The explosion caused Julia to faint--Tyler himself lifted her and carried her to safety. She had been close with her father and was absolutely devastated--and Tyler was there to comfort her. The two grew close, and Tyler finally got her to consent to a secret engagement, proposing in 1844 at the George Washington Ball. The two got married in Philadelphia later that year, and the rest is...weird. Remember, Tyler had seven kids live to maturity with Letitia. He conceived another seven (!) with Julia.
Yeah. Tyler was HORNY. The dude had so many kids that he actually has two living grandsons today: Lyon Gardiner Tyler, who lives in Tennessee, and Harrison Tyler, who lives on and maintains the family’s plantation in Charles City County. Tyler And Texas  Boy, some of those early political cartoons must be the inspiration for the bilge that Ben Garrison puts out now. In early 1843, Tyler had decided that he liked the Presidency. He felt it befit his stature as a prominent Southern politician, and he thought he was good at it. Problem was, he was still a man without a party. The Whigs had kicked him out, and the Democrats didn’t trust him due to his dislike of Andrew Jackson. He needed a hook--something that would get people looking at him specifically in 1844 when he could potentially look to win a Presidential term of his own--or at least salvage his legacy. So he looked to the South, to an item that had been on his agenda ever since he’d assumed the Presidency after Harrison had died: the Republic of Texas. I’m not going to go through a long history of the grand and glorious and bloody revolution that the citizens of the Republic of Texas fought so they could be “free” from Mexico for a grand total of about ten minutes. If I had my druthers, I’d give the whole loving state BACK to Mexico for free. Nevertheless, Tyler thought they were worth it. Annexation had become a focal point of his administration, despite opposition from Secretary of State Daniel Webster--who was pushing Tyler to concentrate more on expanding via the Pacific Coast (California and Oregon, mainly). One historian, William H. Freehling, speculates that Tyler’s motive for concentrating on Texas may have been a way to outmaneuver Great Britain on the slavery issue. They’d been trying to push emancipation in the Republic of Texas as a way to weaken the institution in the southern United States, and Tyler felt that if Texas became the next state, they’d be out of Britain’s reach. So Tyler began floating trial balloons. After the successful negotiation of the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, he directed a friend of his in Congress, Thomas Walker Gilmer, to publish a letter advocating for annexation of Texas. It was well received, so that was step one. Step two was getting himself a Secretary of State who would play ball. Daniel Webster didn’t fit the bill, so he was replaced temporarily by Hugh Legare of South Carolina, a Tyler ally and Texas annexation advocate, then permanently by Abel Upshur, the Secretary of the Navy and close friend of his. Quietly, Upshur and Tyler put feelers out to the government of Texas, promising that if they committed to joining the Union they’d receive federal troops to protect them (they had to be quiet because this was a violation of the Constitution’s requirement of Congressional approval on these matters). Upshur did his part to plant the rumors I mentioned above--that Great Britain was meddling in Texas’ affairs--in order to quell Northern fears about adding another slave state. The North’s anger at Britain’s seeming inability to treat the United States as a functioning country overrode any fear they might have had about upsetting the slave/free balance, and in January of 1844, Upshur had corralled a large majority in the Senate that favored annexation of Texas. It gave Tyler the opening he needed. He re-formed the old Democratic-Republican Party, placed himself as its standard-bearer, and as the Democratic Party was holding its nominating convention in Baltimore that year, the Tyler supporters there were holding “Tyler and Texas” signs. His “new” party granted Tyler their Presidential nomination, significantly splintering the Democratic Party and forcing them to add their own plank for Texas annexation into their party platform that year. The eventual nominee, James Polk, would make it one of his four promises--the things he swore to the nation he would do before leaving office. As for the treaty? Tyler knew that Congress hated him too much to ratify it, but he also knew that public opinion was too strong in favor of annexation for them to ignore it. He’d done what was necessary to bring Texas into the Union. That wasn’t all--due to the fact that former President Andrew Jackson was a staunch supporter of annexation as well, he personally directed the Democratic Party to welcome Tyler back into its fold. Democratic newspaper editors ceased attacking him, and James Polk himself acknowledged that Tyler was officially a Democrat again. Tyler had done what he set out to do. He hadn’t won his own term as President, but he’d made peace with that. He dropped out of the race in August 1844 and wholeheartedly endorsed Polk, whose victory in November over Whig nominee Henry Clay gave Democrats the mandate they needed to bring Texas into the Union. Tyler would sign the bill approving Texas’ admission to the Union three days before he officially left office, and Texas would accept the terms two months later, entering the Union as the 28th state. Postgame  I should mention that this image doesn't quite encapsulate the, ah, "size" of this monument at Tyler's grave. Google the original if you wanna see the whole thing. This is surprisingly more detailed than you might think. Tyler and his wife, Julia, retired to a Virginia plantation called Walnut Grove, located on the James River in Charles City County. He was home. In a slight nod to the fact that Virginia Whigs, the controlling political interest in the state, had “outlawed” him, he renamed the place Sherwood Forest. Heh. That Tyler, he’s such a card. His neighbors didn’t like him much. In a bizarre attempt to humiliate or mock him, they appointed him to the minor local office of overseer of roads in 1847. Perhaps they thought Tyler would think the job “beneath” him after the Presidency. They were hilariously, abjectly wrong--Tyler treated the job very seriously, frequently contracting his neighbors to provide slaves for road work and continuing to insist on carrying out the duties of the job after they asked him to stop. I think it’s safe to say he got the last laugh on this one. Otherwise, Tyler’s life went on as was routine for a Virginia aristocrat--he went to parties, he hosted others of his social class, and he spent summers at his family’s seaside home, the Villa Margaret. He didn’t do much in the way of politics--future Presidents didn’t seek his advice and he didn’t get many visits from former allies. That is, until the mid-1850s. When John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry put the fear of God into the heart of every slaveholder in Virginia, several communities organized militias in response. Tyler was, once again, pressed into military service as captain of his local militia. As the Civil War loomed, he re-entered political life as a member of the Virginia Peace Conference, held in Washington DC. It was a last-ditch effort to prevent war, even though it was being held as the Confederate Constitution was being written in Montgomery, Alabama. Despite his presence at the conference, Tyler opposed its final resolutions. To Tyler, it didn’t protect the rights of slave owners in the territories and too much of it was written by free state delegates--and it wouldn’t preserve the Union. Get ready to hate him, guys. On the same day the Peace Conference started, local Charles City County voters also sent Tyler to the Virginia Secession Convention. After the debacle that was the Peace Conference, Tyler promptly went and voted for all articles of secession proposed, believing that it was Virginia’s only path to preservation. How disappointing. In the end, he was just another racist who believed that his right to own people as property superceded the fact that secession was illegal. Not only did he head up the committee that negotiated Virginia’s entrance into the Confederacy, he signed the Ordinance of Secession in June 1861 and took his seat in the Confederate Congress in August. I suppose the best thing about this sordid part of the tale is that Tyler didn’t live to see the end. Remember, he had suffered from poor health his entire life, and as he got older, he got more susceptible to getting colds in the winter. In January 1862, he vomited and collapsed after complaining of chills and dizziness--prelude to a bad bout of flu, perhaps. However, after extensive treatment, he didn’t get better, and he made plans to go back to Sherwood Forest on the 18th of January, Julia by his side. As he lay in bed the night before, however, all of a sudden he couldn’t breathe, and Julia summoned his doctor, who gave him a sip of brandy. “Doctor, I am going,” Tyler said. The doctor replied, “I hope not, sir,” to which Tyler uttered his final words: “Perhaps it is best.” John Tyler died minutes later, on January 17, 1862, most likely due to a stroke. He remains today one of the only Presidents whose death was not recognized in Washington DC, due to his allegiance to the Confederacy at the time. Nevertheless, Confederate President Jefferson Davis staged a grand funeral, portraying Tyler as a hero to his new nation. His coffin was not draped with the Stars and Stripes but rather with a Confederate flag; Tyler remains the only President in history to not be laid to rest under the United States flag. Tyler’s legacy is generally not held in high esteem by historians. Like I said, he’s an antebellum President and a one-termer--they tend to be generally forgettable. And his embrace of the Confederacy later in life? Inexcusable at best, traitorous at worst. The thing you should all remember, though, is that John Tyler set a precedent without which our nation might have stopped functioning: he informed future Vice Presidents how to interpret Article II when the President dies. In fact, his actions were all we had to go on until they were officially codified in the 25th Amendment in 1967. So thank this forgettable man for that--but don’t like him for it.
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Apr 29, 2019 16:12
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Added Tyler part 2 to the OP! We're getting close to having all the Presidents done. Thanks Fritz! edit: Read part 2 and I really liked it. Guess not much really happened during Tyler's time in office and he was a lovely southerner in the end but he did at least tell us what to do if POTUS dies, which is helpful. axeil fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 16:41
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Hey folks! If you're still paying attention, it's time to hustle your rear end to the Presidents' thread and make your voices heard, cause we're about to choose my next subject. This next one will be a True Masterpiece: a President with reams upon reams of source material and a Presidency that echoes throughout time. That said, some of them aren't good echoes. Case in point: 1. Andrew Jackson The hero of the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson's ascendance represented a new breed of American politics--the first age of populism. He was a virulent racist and an utterly disagreeable human being, but he was bizarrely in tune with a great majority of Americans. His Presidency--and his life--have spawned a number of books, which I look forward to using if you ask me to write about him. 2. Theodore Roosevelt I'm putting him back up on the board! Theodore Roosevelt, of course, is the subject of a VERY excellent 3-part biography written by Edmund Morris that covers his life pre-Presidency, his Presidency, then his post-Presidency. A "steam engine in trousers", his friends and allies called him. Roosevelt's Presidency is perhaps one of the most consequential in the history of the nation, and I am wondering if there's even a way to avoid writing a book-length feature about him, to be honest. 3. Richard Nixon AAAAAAAARRRRRRRROOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! Nixon's lost so many of these polls that he's now basically a head in a jar, but sadly he's no less paranoid, combative, and secretive. Despite the rather distasteful nature of the man himself, his life and Presidency are one of my favorite subjects to read about because of how hosed up he was. He could have been a swell man and a great President but for a few character flaws that doomed him. Plus, Watergate. That by itself will probably be a 20+ page update. You get three choices, so place your bets!
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Apr 29, 2019 17:08
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Going into this all I knew about Tyler was that he was more or less how Texas got into the Union. This was really illuminating especially since I had no idea of his unique notoriety of being a traitorous ex-President. At least his establishment of precedent re: VP becoming President via succession was good. Also I had no idea Henry Clay was just constantly all over the US political system between the War of 1812 and the Civil War (I only sort of vaguely remembered a late Presidential run around the time of the Missouri Compromise). Makes me wonder who holds the record for most unsuccessful Presidential campaigns for a major party. EDIT: Voting Jackson, because I want to know why we put a man who hated Central Banks (and just about everything else it seems) on the $20 Angry_Ed fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 17:09
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i vote for america's most genocidal president: Jackson
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Apr 29, 2019 17:16
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I'll vote Jackson too. Tyler update was an interesting read, keep it up!
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Apr 29, 2019 17:22
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I'm sorry Mr. Jackson, I am, for real, but I want to hear about Nixon
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Apr 29, 2019 17:36
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Tyler was interesting, didn't realize there was that much infighting. Clay is a right rear end in a top hat, it seems. Voting Jackson.
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Apr 29, 2019 17:55
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I'd like to read about the paranoid and petty President that's not currently in the White House. Nixon please.
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Apr 29, 2019 18:02
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| # ? Jun 11, 2024 09:23 |
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Nixon
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Apr 29, 2019 18:05
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