To believe the national press, one man perhaps shouldn`t become president because he might be a wimp.
To believe one historian, however, four young men might have become president in part because they were mama`s boys.
”A great number of our prominent Americans, including some of our most renowned presidents, were mama`s boys as children,” says David McCullough, author of ”Mornings on Horseback,” a biography of young Theodore Roosevelt.
”Whether or not being a mama`s boy is a good thing depends mainly upon what sort of person Mama was,” says McCullough, who now is preparing a biography of Harry S Truman.
With the political season hot upon us, it seems the proper time to consider the supposed birthright of every American citizen: the right to grow up to be president.
It`s never too early for right-thinking parents to groom their sons or daughters. Consider the pay: $200,000 a year. There`s also a $50,000 expense allowance, plus free office space.
One problem: A person has to wait until he or she is 35 years old to become president.
Meanwhile, here`s a 10-point primer for grooming your future chief executive.
– Future presidents are honest.
The most familiar qualification for president dates to about 1800, when an Episcopalian priest, Mason Locke ”Parson” Weems, published the first popular biography of George Washington, which included the enduring fable of young George, his new hatchet and his father`s cherry tree.
George didn`t tell a lie. Weems did.
”Weems made up most of those `young George` stories,” said Paul F. Boller Jr., professor emeritus of history at Texas Christian University in Ft. Worth and author of ”Presidential Anecdotes.” ”He wanted to present Washington as a model for young Americans.”
It worked. ”That biography was read by thousands of people,” Boller says. ”Abraham Lincoln read it. And you didn`t necessarily have to believe that cherry tree story to know that George Washington wasn`t the kind of guy who went around lying.”
– Future presidents are good boys-or girls.
Boller, whose ”Presidential Anecdotes” chronicles the young lives of most of the presidents, can`t remember any future chief executive greasing trolley rails on an incline.
”Andrew Jackson was belligerent as a young man and wouldn`t `stay throwed` in a fight,” he says. ”But that`s about all I can think of.”
”On the average, you`re talking about a bunch of kids who were pretty well-behaved,” says Donald McCoy, professor of history at the University of Kansas.
”Coolidge was a good boy,” McCoy says. ”He was so good you can`t quite believe it.”
– Some future presidents have had strong, dominant mothers.
Truman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson and Jimmy Carter were all mama`s boys, McCullough says.
”In each case, Mama was the daughter of a father she adored,”
McCullough says. ”They were Papa`s girls. And often, particularly in the case of Truman and Johnson, the husbands of these women were something of a disappointment. So the mother was putting all her chips on Junior.”
That goes especially for Truman. ”Harry Truman was a mama`s boy,”
McCullough says. ”But Mama, in the case of Martha Ellen Young Truman, was a strong, vivid human being who conveyed vitality to everyone around her, particularly to her oldest son, Harry.
”Every time Harry left the house, she would say, `Now, Harry, you be a good boy.` She was still saying that to him as he went out the door as president of the United States.”
– Future presidents are not necessarily athletic.
”Athletics doesn`t have anything to do with anybody`s capability to be president,” says Phillip Paludan, professor of history at the University of Kansas and an Abraham Lincoln expert. ”Lincoln was known to be strong and agile, a wrestler, but that was something that went along with the farming life.”
Still, even the first presidents were athletes.
”Jefferson was a spectacular athlete, a great horseman,” McCullough says, ”and Washington could pick up an iron bar and throw it farther than most men, even while in advanced age.”
With the rise of team sports such as baseball in the late 19th Century, the American public began to look at some sports, such as golf, as perhaps too elite, Boller says.
”When William Howard Taft ran for president, Theodore Roosevelt warned him to never be photographed on a golf course,” Boller says.
Dwight D. Eisenhower, who played football for the U.S. Military Academy, is more remembered for his approaches to the green. And Gerald Ford, perhaps the most distinguished presidential athlete as a football player for the University of Michigan, would be pegged as clumsy later in life-and bean the occasional fairway spectator with his slices and hooks.
Other presidents did their best.
FDR played football briefly at Harvard, then became a cheerleader.
For those presidents who were uncoordinated boys, such as Truman and Theodore Roosevelt, who had terrible eyesight, growing up to be commander-in- chief of the armed forces may have represented the ultimate revenge of the nerds.
– Future presidents read books.
”Almost without exception,” McCullough says, ”those who have become president of the United States have in their childhood been exposed to books. It`s plainly a common denominator.”
Truman, in fact, once said he had read every book in the Independence library as a boy. The Independence library near the turn of the century, however, was not nearly as big as the usual municipal library of today.
– Future presidents finish their homework.
”There`s a bookishness remarkable in all these people,” says Robert H. Ferrell, professor of history at Indiana University in Bloomington and the editor and author of several Truman volumes. He is spending the summer doing research at the Harry S Truman Library in Independence.
”In these people you find diligence and a willingness to read and expand their intellectual horizons. A case against that would have been (Warren G.)
Harding, who seems not to have shown much. He was quite bright, but he was essentially lazy.”
FDR, sent to Groton, the Massachusetts preparatory school, was ”not a scholarly kid,” says Richard McKinzie, professor of history at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. ”Those were the days when young people made their
`gentleman`s C.` Roosevelt always strived to make his `gentleman`s C.` ”
– Not all future presidents go on to the best colleges.
”Lincoln spent a year, all told, in a classroom,” Paludan says. ”He was self-educated; yet what he knew, he knew well. He had read Shakespeare,
(Sir William) Blackstone on the law and the speeches of major political figures.”
Truman, who couldn`t attend college for lack of money, also educated himself.
– Future presidents don`t necessarily have to go to law school.
Of the first 33 men elected president, 22 were lawyers.
For 19th Century men such as Lincoln, the law served as a ”union card”
that allowed its holders into politics, Paludan says.
”Lincoln`s family were farmers,” Paludan says. ”For Lincoln the law was a way out of a life that was taking him nowhere.”
FDR earned a law degree but didn`t like the work, McKinzie says. ”It was considered an appropriate occupation for a gentleman of means,” McKinzie says. ”But he only practiced for a short time.”
– Future presidents should live young lives that later can be used in political campaigns.
James Garfield as a boy drove a team of horses that towed a barge along the Ohio Canal. ”When his supporters nominated Garfield, they made a big deal of that,” Boller says.
That Garfield worked on the canal for all of six weeks and fell into the canal, by his own accounting, 14 times, is beside the point. ”The American people like a president to have a common touch and to have done some good, hard work as a boy,” Boller says.
– It isn`t necessary, but future presidents would do well to have wealthy parents.
The rags-to-riches story among American presidents is ”quite unusual,”
Paludan says. ”A high percentage of presidents come from families that, if not wealthy, are at least upper middle class.”
Although it`s true that Lincoln`s parents were not rich, ”Lincoln`s parents weren`t as bad off as Lincoln liked to point out,” Paludan says.
”Lincoln`s family had to own at least some property. The family owned two or three farms at one point.”
Truman may be the best example of going the furthest with the least amount of family money behind him.
”Truman had no money, ever,” McCullough says. ”He never owned a house. He was never given trips to Europe. He was given a car by his mother. When he got married, all he had was an Army uniform, a few suits and some books. That`s in contrast to Franklin Roosevelt. But I think it works both ways.
”Truman grew up knowing, because he was told and from his own experience, that whatever he became depended on what he did himself. Roosevelt grew up knowing that, because of who he was, a lot was expected of him.
”Each one had to live up to a kind of standard.” –
