Last week saw the first glimpses of Barack Obama’s forthcoming memoir, titled A Promised Land, due out next month. Most passages trickling out are the self-congratulatory navel-gazing and partisan finger-pointing you’d imagine from the former president (who is now on his third memoir). Yet one I found very interesting: According to the CNN preview, Obama “writes, somewhat lightheartedly, about how the stress of the White House led to his bad tendencies, like smoking, noting that he would sometimes smoke eight or nine or ten cigarettes a day and look for a ‘discreet location to grab an evening smoke.’” He says he later quit smoking after his daughter Malia disapproved.
While eight to 10 cigarettes per day is excessive, put me down as finding Obama slightly more likable for this. Whatever you think of it, such a habit certainly comes with the territory. Presidential vices are nearly as emblematic of the office as the seal.
George Washington reportedly drank four glasses of fortified Madeira wine every afternoon, and John Adams had fermented hard cider with breakfast every morning. No. 7, Andrew Jackson, basically subsisted on gin exclusively for the last decades of his life, while No. 14, Franklin Pierce, earned himself the title “the hero of many a well-fought bottle.” As author Brian Abrams documents in his book Party Like a President: True Tales of Inebriation, Lechery, and Mischief From the Oval Office, it’s quite possible, if not likely, Andrew Johnson was three sheets to the wind after a few shots of whiskey when he gave his slurring inaugural speech for vice president in 1865.
Presidents have had other vices, of course. Taft was so rotund that he had a bigger bathtub installed in the White House. John F. Kennedy loved cheating on his wife even more than LBJ loved profanity and almost as much as Woodrow Wilson loved racism. Donald Trump, though a teetotaler, has a near-daily penchant for McDonald’s, a habit once shared by Bill Clinton.
Yet alcohol is the most common. Martin Van Buren drank so much, and so proficiently, that his friends dubbed him the “Blue Whiskey Van.” He reportedly could go on a bender and still maintain a simulacrum of sobriety. Nevertheless, William Henry Harrison’s successful 1840 presidential campaign had no trouble painting him as an alcoholic.
Harry Truman, like Adams, preferred a strong morning drink. Instead of hard cider, the Missourian started his day with an ounce of 100-proof Old Grand-Dad whiskey “to get the engine running.” While by no means the heaviest drinking president, Truman famously loved bourbon. On April 12, 1945, Truman was sitting down to a glass of it with his good friend and drinking buddy, House Speaker Sam Rayburn, in the speaker’s secret Capitol hideaway, when he got the call that FDR had died. The official story is he never got to take a sip before the phone rang. He put the phone down and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ and General Jackson!”
