After quite some time remembering the information but having the source bugging me, I was finally able to dig up an article and no wonder I couldn't find the damn source before—I kept checking Jean Edward Smith and Michael Korda's biographies. I thought this seemed a little too salty for their writing styles.
Anyway, two fun takeaways: 1) it's quite possible Ike used to paint in the same small room in the White House where Warren Harding used to go bang his mistress (thank god for the Truman renovations; decent chance otherwise the amount of seed spilled in there would've meant it was the honorary office for the Secretary of Agriculture) and 2) Ike remained a humble man, despite being President.
Questioned about his painting, Eisenhower's response? "Let's get something straight here, Cohen. They would have burned this [shit?] a long time ago if I weren't the president of the United States."
Alas, not all painter presidents can be George W. Bush, who is truly a one-man Renaissance.
Harding and Bush, of course, have something in common in terms of their economic policies helping to lead to catastrophe—though we've got to give Bush some credit for streamlining the process. It took Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover along with the aftermath of WWI to lead to the Great Depression—the Great Recession he managed in roughly two terms! Not the kind of "faster and bigger," I like, personally.
As with Eisenhower, Jean Edward Smith's biography of Bush, coincidentally, is probably the best current one out there—though, admittedly, he lets his distaste for Bush shine through. Reminds me this is an era I need to pick up more on. Bush's memoir about his father, 43, is an enjoyable read (I even got a nifty edition of it) and an intriguing historical document, but needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
As he discusses there, the only other father-son pair of presidents in US history have no surviving documents attesting: we don't have a memoir or reflections of John Quincy Adams about John Adams. Bush, very self-consciously, sought to change this—and makes it clear that everything written has a particular eye toward being a historical document.
His commonalities with Eisenhower—well, as much as Eisenhower jokes in the linked article that if not for being president, his paintings wouldn't have a show, the same applies for Bush. But Eisenhower's paintings actually sound enjoyable whereas it's a good thing Bush seems to be pretty open to poking fun at his own shortcomings as an artist; to borrow from the article at the start:
“Let’s get something straight here... They would have burned this shit a long time ago if [he] weren’t the president of the United States.”
As far as Eisenhower: I do have a personal opinion that his policies, and close work with the Dulles brothers, led to a lot of bad geopolitical moves that set the stage for present-day problems we're still dealing with. If you consider our approach to international affairs under Nixon, Eisenhower's VP before becoming president in his own right, I believe we also see the problems begun by Eisenhower deepened, in particular with regards to South America and Asia (Chile and Vietnam, even more specifically).
Comments
Post a Comment