H. W. Brands: "Comedian in Chief"

thank you so much for joining us tonight winter and spring are battling it out here in Grand Rapids but in spite of the weather it's always wonderful to be with you my name is Scott st. Louis and I have the privilege of serving as program manager for the common ground initiative in the Hauenstein Center right here at Grand Valley State University to our partners at the Gerald R Ford Presidential Foundation in the Gerald R Ford Presidential Library and Museum we thank you for all of your hard work in making ours the best partnership in the country between a presidential Study Center and a National Archives facility as our director Gleaves Whitney often says to Bryan how Einstein to members of the Grand Valley Board of Trustees and senior management team to president emeritus Don and Nancy lubbers to Peter and Joan Secchia and to every supporter of the Hauenstein Center we are likewise grateful for your committed stewardship of the Civic institutions that make West Michigan a lovely place to live rain or shine let's have a round of applause as many of you know the Hauenstein Center has three important rules we are a presidential study center we are home to the common ground initiative and we are a center for leadership excellence named after one of Colonel Ralph W Howe Einstein's closest friends our Peter C Cooke Leadership Academy is a vital component of advancing Ralph's vision for ethical effective leadership in the 21st century the Academy is currently providing more than 60 student fellows with rigorous educational and professional development opportunities on campus and all around the world we enjoy sharing the stage with our fellows at these events time and again they do a wonderful job of sharing with us what the Hauenstein Center has meant to them this tradition is called the leadership minute and tonight's leadership minute will be given by Kelly Hoffman please help me welcome Kelly my name is Kelly Hoffman and I'm a cook Leadership Academy fellow as a third year resident assistant for Grand Valley Housing I have gained substantial leadership experience I have facilitated intergroup dialogue created community programming and worked for a department dedicated to inclusion and equity but I did not want to stop there following the pleasant surprise of being nominated by a trusted mentor I joined the Academy to continue to grow as a leader the self-reflections and extra opportu like speak up and be effective have equipped me with invaluable tools with which to move forward through committed mentors and goal-oriented workshops the Academy has encouraged me to be a leader who listens first who practices empathy and who empowers people to share their voices after graduation I hope to work in the legal field and earn a JD with the focus on immigration law my name is kelly hoffman and i am a leader thank you thank you very much Kelly you do us proud I want to welcome this audience and also our c-span viewers let me say the obvious if you'll bear with it the Hauenstein Center for presidential studies exists because of Ralph Hauenstein and we honor Ralph in every program that we put on and we take pride in his legacy of leadership and service as Scott just mentioned and also in recalling his irrepressible sense of humor ralph was often the funniest guy in the room and I just wanted to share with you you know as he was approaching the century mark he was often asked by people everybody wanted the elixir of life and they come to Ralph and they would say what's your secret how do you do this and he would always come back you know he had that quick whip and he was adamant he'd say don't eat organic food when you're my age you need all the preservatives you can get you laughed you laughed and that's a good thing because for Ralph that was one of the keys to staying young as for all of us and so we remember Ralph and we enjoy Ralph especially in a program like tonight we'll bill Brandt's we'll be talking about humor Ralph would want us to remember to laugh but we're also pretty serious at the Helen Stein Center because we have serious business to do in these times we live in very challenging times so we do three things I think that Scott went over them very able very quickly but I just want to reiterate we're a presidential Studies Centre that seeks to generate and disseminate knowledge understanding even wisdom about the forces and the personalities that people have been in the most powerful office in the world so we disseminate that second we are the common ground initiative which promotes civic dialogue in search of the common good and third we are the Peter C Cooke Leadership Academy you just saw a wonderful representative in Kelly and what we try to do there is the 60 to 70 young leaders is to grow them into becoming thinking leaders and leading thinkers now there are very few speakers who I would invite to this podium or to this stage as you see bill doesn't use podiums very few speakers that I would invite who has a wingspan adequate to cover all three of those areas bill brands is I almost look at you as a triathlete among historians because you do fulfill all three functions that we have at the Hauenstein Center for example in the area of presidential studies look at Bill's signal achievements again and again and again yeah I think you write a book every year and if you want to know about Presidents Andrew Jackson Ulysses Grant you go into the 20th century TR FDR you've got Truman and you got eisenhower he's written about Johnson he's variety of venues he has written about these leading presidents and that way they have shaped America and our institutions so bills one of the best in the business if you want to to read these really good works oh he's such a an approachable writer when it comes to helping Americans find common ground bills also great at that and I have just stolen wholesale his ability to talk to large audiences and he's got a technique that I really find very helpful so if Bill sense the senses that an audience like you are liberal he will tack right he'll go in the conservative direction just to irritate just to you know be a burr under your saddle if he senses that you're conservative he'll tack left again the idea is to to broaden your perspective and that's the most important starting place for common ground and then when it comes to leadership development I've got to say and I've been telling bill this for 15 years now we've had Bill come back year after year after year bill it's been 15 years I think and the reason we do is that bill is the most accessible of all the speakers we have he's and most importantly he's the most accessible to students and that's ultimately what we're about we're about the students who come to Grand Valley into the cook Leadership Academy and take part in the Hauenstein Center programs that accessibility is wonderful and you can see it I mean if you've interacted with Bill it's contagious then you want to go back to the books you know and for example if you want to read about the relationship between MacArthur and Truman you know you've got a book that Bill's written if you want to you know understand better how people in Congress work well Bill's got a book it's available for purchase and for his autograph after this program the heirs of the founders that's a very serious and important book and a very timely and needed book in our age well this evening bill is going to share with us I think a really intriguing idea this idea of humor it's more than haha humor is actually a way that unites presidential studies with common ground because humor breaks down barriers with leadership often you know when a leader needs to be self-deprecating for example the invocation of humor will be very good so ladies and gentlemen I hope you enjoy this evenings event I think you will find it amusing as well as enlightening please join me in welcoming Bill brands I'm delighted to be back and I'm delighted to see some familiar faces many familiar faces I have to say that that does give me a little bit of pause especially given the topic I'm going to be speaking about tonight but before I get there I want I have to say that I need as I always do to command Gleaves and Scott and the staff of the Hauenstein Center because over the years and I I haven't been here since the very beginning but I've seen a lot of the development of the Hauenstein Center and from the beginning it was one of the and now it has become the premier institution for the study of the presidency but one of the most gratifying things to me as an educator is how its branched out into leadership studies into the common ground initiative and this to me is a model of what public university should be doing so those of us who are on the faculty on the teaching side I teach and I write and I speak to groups like this but centers like the Hauenstein Center are able to do things that don't fit into either one of those particular models specifically into the writing or into the classroom it's bringing people like you together people who most of you are not in a position to be in a classroom and sign up for class but you're interested in this kind of work you're interested in what makes this country the country that it's become and so I cannot say enough good things about the Hauenstein Center about all the people who've made the Hauenstein Center possible through their donations through their support and through the good work they've done over the years and I am most flattered than honored to be back again so I'm gonna talk about a subject that I thought we need a little bit of Gleaves asked me last fall so what would you like to talk about he always invites me to come in the dead of winter because President's Day falls in February and we've been talking about either getting Congress or somebody to move President's Day or we'll just sort of do it ourselves in a de facto sense but I'm particularly flattered that you all came out on a nasty night like tonight so thank you now the reason I said it gave me some pause to see all of the familiar faces and that is because I'm gonna tell parts of my story that you will have heard before but I'll tell you and maybe you'll have the same reaction at the University of Texas I speak regularly to some of the continuing education programs they have and the people who attend are mostly retired folks and I would say that at the average age of audiences I just spoke at one a couple of days ago the average age of audiences is probably 75 or so and there are several of these programs and I speak to them often to several of them in the course of a year and I confess and I confess to them that I don't always keep straight what I told to which group and so there was one session a few years ago where I said this and I said now I don't remember exactly what I might have told you I'm so forgive me if I repeat myself and at that point a silver haired gentleman in the back stood up and he said Sonny if you don't remember we sure as heck don't so now you're of course are much younger than this group but maybe you'll grant me a little bit of that leeway if you've heard some of these stories before but so Gleaves asked me what i wanted to talk about and I was at a bit of a loss because typically I talk about the book that I've just published I get on a roll flogging the book and I've been on a book tour but Gleaves got out ahead of this last year because he asked me to talk about the book that was coming up it's very clever in this regard because he gets a scoop on the stuff on everybody else and on what is gonna be published and be said so I haven't published a new book since I talked about my book it's called heirs of the founders and it's available for $30 after the accession you will you will not want to leave home leave and go home without it so I had to think of something else and this is a subject I'm gonna be talking about well sort of humor in the White House and as I was thinking of this title I realized uh-oh this is a potential problem because I was really talking about the presidents and jokes and humor and I know enough about the history of the president seen some of you perhaps will have caught on to this there's a potential problem there there were two presidents who served before the White House was the official residence of the President and so if I wanted to say well the presidency in humor humor in the White House didn't quite do it but then I thought about it some more and actually it does work because neither of the first two presidents had a sense of humor so it gets me out of that problem but I'm going to follow the lead of perhaps the most successful humorist in the White House it might not be the person that you're thinking of by doing what he always did or in most cases what he did at the beginning of a talk he started with a joke now again some of you will have heard this joke but please pretend you haven't heard it before and laughed at the appropriate point so this is a joke and this is a key to part of my story that Ronald Reagan used to tell and the key is as you'll see Ronald Reagan was effectively telling this story on himself it related to a time in his career when he didn't know sort of what he was doing or where he was going as you will know of Ronald Reagan he had two careers primarily he was a film actor and then he became a politician but there was an interregnum a period between the time basically after he stopped getting calls from Hollywood producers he couldn't get any good roles between when his career ended and his political career is film career ended his political career began and he had well a rather unusual position in fact it was a job that was invented for him by the General Electric Corporation General Electric at the time was the great industrial behemoth of the American economy and Reagan was their paid spokesman and he was a host a television host for the GE theater and the GE theater was well it was an experiment in television this is in the 1950s and nobody knows quite what to do with TV and so they think well what you do with the television camera is you film plays and then people just watch plays on TV so Reagan was the host he wasn't the star he was in a couple of these but he mostly just introduced them and then the show went on that's what he would do on weekends during the week he would travel the country giving speeches on behalf of General Electric and the glories and wonders and conveniences of electricity better living through electricity this was anybody and he would find himself because Reagan in that phase of his life was afraid to fly and he had written into his contract that he would not flock and so he traveled by train across the country and he would go through small towns and very often he would find himself addressing the local Rotary Club or the Elks or the Chamber of Commerce and he used to call as other people have the rubber chicken circuit and he would find himself these small towns where people didn't know who he was because he wasn't famous he was never saw an a-list actor he was sort of the b-list actor as does Jack Warner his boss at Warner Brothers said when he heard that Reagan was running for president of the United Center of California in the 1960s he said no no Jimmy Stewart for governor Reagan for best friend and that was the kind of roles he played so anyway he's this relative nonentity and he's going to these rather obscure towns and giving these sort of standard talks so the story that Reagan told went like this he is about to give a talk in some small town in the Midwest and he doesn't know the people he's going to be speaking to it's been lined up by his publicity agent and so he's going to address this group and one of the locals the the program director of whatever club it was we'll call it the alex is gonna introduce reagan but the thing is that the program director isn't familiar with Ronald Reagan and he simply sees the printed name Ronald Rea GaN on the program and he's supposed to introduce him and act like he knows something about him but the problem is that he doesn't know how the last name Rea GaN is supposed to be pronounced it could be Reagan it could be Regan and people of Irish background produced pronounce it both ways so this man is in a quandary now this is back in the 1950s you know today you could just go on YouTube and somebody would be introducing him and hear how it was pronounced no you couldn't do it then so this guy and he's he's pretty conscientious he wants to get it right he doesn't want to embarrass his guests he doesn't want to embarrass his group so he's trying to figure out how he's gonna resolve this problem how he's going to discover how the name is pronounced so he's deep in thought on the morning before the the talk and it's a small town he's walking around he's walking around like this through one of the neighborhoods and just oh and while he's walking he encounters one of his neighbors the neighbors out walking his dog and in fact so this guy actually doesn't counter the neighbor he actually trips over the dog and it's oh and the neighbor says well Joe boy you really look like you're worried what's going on and Joe starts to say well he explains the deal and he's starting to say and he so he reached in his pocket he pulls out the program and he says do you know this guy you ever heard of this guy how do I pronounce his name and he looked at oh it's it's Ronald Reagan yeah he used to be an actor and Joseph so you're sure it's Reagan yeah yeah it's Reagan you say Reagan you'll be fine there's a ho boy thanks you've lifted a huge load off of my shoulders and he starts walking back and he repeats himself Reagan Reagan Reagan and as he's walking back he again trips over the dog and he looks nice that's a cute dog what kind of dog is it a bagel so this is this is Ronald Regan's approach and it characterizes sort of a large part of where I'm going to be going with my talk because by the time Reagan was president humor was considered a necessary part of the political arsenal of a present of a candidate and this because well you know I told you this story and no one would say it's an enormous Lee clever story but it's enough to get a ha ha ha a little bit Reagan recognized from those years on the rubber chicken circuit that if there's an audience that doesn't know you if there's an audience that might be a little bit skeptical about the message that you're conveying if you can get them to laugh it loosens them up it makes them feel that you're a real person and not simply this flack for GE and it worked for Reagan and GE it worked for Reagan as governor for Reagan as president of the United States and it represented something of a culmination of a trend that had been going on for a long period of time so I'm gonna cover some of that trend now well I was after I told leaves what the topic was gonna be tonight I sort of got to thinking about a little bit more and I happen to be teaching as of well this January so just last month a course that I teach this course every other year and of course on the history of the presidency and it's standard for me to begin the course with I put up on our screen like this I put an image and illustration in this case a portrait of our first president and our current president and I've been teaching it long enough that I go back to this this course back to George W Bush and so our first president our current president and underneath the one word explain and so this is the theme of the course this is what the students actually have to do on their final exam how did we get from George Washington to George W Bush how did we get from George Washington to Barack Obama how did we get from George Washington to Donald now one of the striking things is that if you go from George Washington to most presidents before the current president you see a kind of linear progression now some people would think that it's a decline that the curve slopes down in fact this question of this comparison between the first president and the current president goes all the way back to the second president presidents always look better in the rearview mirror than they do when they're right front and center part of this is that we tend to I don't know we sort of tend to forget the failures and remember the successes that's part of it the other thing is that presidents are usually pretty talented people and so there's they usually have a lot of positive things that can be said about them but while they're president typically the other party or sometimes factions with their own party have an incentive to tell you all the bad things about them but once they leave office that incentive is largely gone this is why certain presidents fool themselves into thinking you know I could have run for a third term Dwight Eisenhower Dwight Eisenhower was more popular by polling at the end of his presidency than he was at the beginning of his presidency and he used to think boy I could have gotten a third term Bill Clinton Bill Clinton was more popular in the year 2000 than he was in the year 1993 he used to think that okay if he could have run for a third term he would have won they fool themselves because by 1960 the Democrats had no incentive to go after Dwight Eisenhower they were focusing all their fire on the next one Richard Nixon the Republicans in 2000 had no particular reason to go after Bill Clinton anymore he got a free pass they were aiming their guns at Al Gore so this question of sort of popularity and how presidents look better in the rearview mirrors partly do this artifact if nobody sniping at them anymore once they while they're in office everybody is and you learn all the bad stuff about them but perhaps the clearest statement the clearest assertion of presidential decline was made by Henry Adams who was an observer of presidents from the well he was the grandson of John Adams and so he was the great-grandson of John Adams and the grandson of John Quincy Adams Henry Adams he had brothers and the Adams family was in this state of political decline where there were two Adams presidents in their background but Henry Adams couldn't make even a start in politics but Henry Adams became a very distinguished historian and he was when he was writing in the 1860s let 1860's and early 1870s when Ulysses Grant was president and this was just ten years after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species the introduction of the theory of evolution and Adams take on this was that anybody who looks at the progression of the presidency from George Washington to Ulysses Grant understands that evolution is a crock that it utterly refutes the theory anyway but I am gonna start oh so I was gonna say that so therefore in most cases it looks as though there's this linear line there's this line that maybe you think it goes down maybe think goes up but in George Washington's tough act to fall but there's a striking thing at least I'm gonna propose this to you and you can decide whether you agree with us or not there is one cent one cents at least in which Donald Trump is positively and this is an adjective that I haven't heard applied to Donald Trump that Donald Trump is positively Washingtonian he is very much like the father of our country and do you know what can you guess what I'm gonna say is that particular that particular characteristic that 6:03 that's not too bad all right well well okay so I I hear it in the front but I'm not gonna advertise just yet you all know the story and well I don't know if you all know this but it's part of America historical war that George Washington you know the story about George Washington and the cherry tree and how he chopped down the cherry tree news filers said you know who chopped down the cherry tree and said I cannot tell a lie I chopped it down with my axe and so on so we have this impression that George Washington couldn't tell a lie I don't actually think that's true I've read enough of Washington's diary in letters to know they fudged the truth but if George watch whether or not George Washington couldn't tell a lie he could not tell a joke and he couldn't tell a joke or maybe it's just that he wouldn't tell a joke nor would he laugh at jokes and this in part because he self-consciously presented himself to the world as this very sober minded serious character as a young man he got a hold of this list of sort of Maxim's and Falana principles of life for a young man there's something like a hundred and ten of them and one of them said laughs seldom and never in distinguished company he wrote this down and these were words that he came to live by now I really don't know if in his private life George Washington I don't think he told jokes he might have laughed at jokes but he's in his public life he certainly did not and people would try to warm him up there's a story that is told on good authority about George Washington at the Constitutional Convention this is before he's president but he's actually president of the convention and he is this austere figure he's the commander of the Continental Army he's the one who won the Revolutionary War and therefore the independence for these United States and he's presiding over the Constitutional Convention and he was chosen in part because he was this very straight-laced sober minded individual he also wouldn't say much he was known that he wouldn't participate in the debates and you make him president the presiding officer and that gives him an excuse not to but some of the other members of the convention they one in particular governor Morris who was he had lived different times in New York and Pennsylvania and he was a delegate to the convention from Pennsylvania and he was very much a hail-fellow-well-met type and he he walked on a wooden leg and the story that was sometimes told about him he liked to tell the story that he had lost his leg in the Revolutionary War it was a battle injury the other story that was told about him is that he badly injured himself diving out of the bedroom window of one of his lovers just at the moment that her husband was returning home and it was badly set and lay had to be amputated anyway governor governor Morris was one who wanted this convention to be well not quite as somber as it seemed to be so he made a bet with some of his friends there including Alexander Hamilton Alexander Hamilton led the other side and Hamilton knew washington better then Morris did and so he he made this bet that he could actually loosen up George Washington and so Hamilton said you got a bet what do you want the wager to be ah it'll be the finest dinner in Philadelphia for a dozen of each of our friends so if I win then you treat us if you win I treat you so he goes up to George Washington and this is a break in the gathering and he puts it he slaps George Washington on the shoulder puts his arm around it says George how you doin glad to see you and the way governor Morris tells the story he said at that moment General Washington fixed me with an icy glare and he took my hand and lifted it off his shoulder and fixed me with that gaze and all I could think about was how can I get out of this room as quickly as possible that was George Washington and that was the kind of person Americans expected as their president that's kind of person Americans wanted as their president in the early days of the Republic in what I call the Augustan age of the American presidency age that runs from George Washington up through John Quincy Adams before the United States became a democracy that is a system in which ordinary people actually exercise political power ordinary people did not elect George Washington ordinary people for the most part did not even elect the electors who chose George Washington according to the Constitution and there are copies that the Hauenstein Center is giving away out there you'll read that each state shall select electors and it doesn't say how they get to choose the Legislature's of the states get to choose how the electors are chosen and until as late as the 1820s most state legislatures chose the electors not voters in the state and in that era Americans expected their presidents to stand above them no one wanted George Washington just one of the game and this is why Washington could get away with giving that reaction to governor Morris because it really served his purposes to be this one who held himself apart from everybody else because that's what Americans wanted and the idea that the presidency when he became president the presidency was a serious undertaking and the idea that your president should have a sense of humor that laugh and laugh especially in any kind of public setting this this just clashed with the idea that politics is a serious business governing this country is a serious business and so you're really hard-pressed to find a sense of humor to find anybody in the White House telling jokes really before about Andrew Jackson who's elected in 1828 even with Andrew Jackson it's a little bit hard to find anything that looks like modern humor and I I took up this subject understanding that conveying jokes or humor from the past to the present is a difficult undertaking because tastes change and perhaps you've heard the saying of felonious monk that writing about music is like dancing about architecture well it's a little bit like that too to translate you'll see to translate humor from the past to the present something is lost in the translation but I'm gonna try anyway and I think this is you look like a learner audience so I think you're gonna be able to get this one Andrew Jackson is the first really popularly elected president he's the one who makes the presidency pre-eminently the people's office and his election appalled members of the establishment members odd well the Adams family and supporters of all those presidents who had come from the elite from the American aristocracy he was the first real common man to be president and especially in places like New England around Boston around Harvard College the idea that this unlettered westerner this uncouth militarist should be President of the United States was something they had a really hard time getting their heads around and John Quincy Adams who was defeated by Jackson in 1828 and went back to Massachusetts to lick his wounds and to really fret over the future of the Republic if this is the kind of person the presidency attracts there is no hope well there were people in New England there were people at Harvard who took a different view this is the way the world is going we have to make our peace with it and so the board of trustees of Harvard decided that in the interests of holding out an olive branch they were going to present they were going to offer to President Jackson an honorary Harvard degree John Quincy Adams almost had a fit and he wrote to the president of Harvard saying you can't do this it will sully the reputation of my dear alma mater but the occasion went forward there were dissenters on the faculty and they decided Oh we can't stop this but we will show Jackson up in those days it was not unheard of and it was still accepted practice on certain occasions for academics to give their addresses to deliver their papers in Latin their traditional language of intellectuals in the Academy and so without telling the president of the University who was basically whose reputation was online here what they were gonna do say okay sure I'll be happy to speak on this occasion and it was a commencement and so there were several speeches and the speakers before Jackson stood up and gave their speeches in Latin with the belief that this would really flummox Jackson he obviously would not know what was happening and would be so embarrassed that he would be humiliated and it would be shown up and that would be the end of it now as I say with explaining these historical stories context is necessary this was at a moment when Jackson was holding the Union together by main force South Carolina was threatening to secede from the union over a tariff that it didn't like and Jackson was asserting no the Union is central the Union must hold so this is the background and everybody is waiting to hear what the president is going to say Jackson was the first of presidents and this became a very common thing over the years for presidents and other distinguished members of the government secretaries of state the Marshall Plan for example was announced in a Harvard commencement address so Jackson is going to give this pronouncement on the current state and he's also going to deal with this attempt by the Harvard faculty to embarrass him so Jackson stands up and he says e pluribus unum seen a quad on and sat down alright enough of you know your Latin to get the joke so anyway that's the best I've got on a joke from Jackson and I and I have to confess I have to confess that that story is probably somewhat exaggerated it's in the nature of Jackson wasn't particularly funny guy but one of the things that you see in the evolution of the presidency is not always that the presidents are the ones telling the jokes are telling the stories but the President becomes the object sometimes the butt of the stories and the jokes in a way that wasn't true it which really was considered sort of less majesty with somebody like George Washington to tell things like that but with Jackson things are fair game the office of the presidency evolves until somebody like well the next it's really sort of ordinary person to get elected president is Abraham Lincoln and Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the most famous what shall I say humorist in the White House and Lincoln was known for and this is key and you'll see a connection here between Lincoln and Ronald Reagan Lincoln told stories he told jokes but he realized that in politics when you tell jokes jokes often have a target the person who is being joked about or being teased and Lincoln understood that in politics in democratic politics politics we are asking for votes the only safe target of a joke is you yourself if you target anybody else well you're gonna alienate them and their friends and people who feel an affinity toward them if you tell a joke about yourself the first good thing happens is that you avoid that and the second thing is you make people think he doesn't have a big ego he can tell jokes about himself it humanizes these presidents for people and we see the beginning of a trend that would set in really in full in the 20th century whereby the 20th century certainly by the second half of the 20th century if you had to figure out who is going to win any election any given election you can look at things like unemployment rates and you can look at political platforms and you can look at other things but the most reliable single indicator is what you could generically call a likeability index which of the candidates would you rather sit down and have a beer with and if there's a clear difference between the two candidates that candidate is likely to win well with Lincoln this business of likability we see it for the first time in Lincoln really needs to make himself like a bull he also did have a certain wit and not everybody is blessed with the kind of wit that can sort of turn a particular situation in a humorous direction but there was this is a story told about Lincoln but you'll see that Lincoln has the punch line so Lincoln before he went into politics and after his sojourn in the House of Representatives in the 1840s was a practicing lawyer and lawyers in Springfield Illinois to make a living they had to ride the circuit with the judges there wasn't enough business in Springfield itself so they would go out and there was all sorts of people who were lawyers they could start young and they would hang on till they were old and Lincoln had a lawyer friend or maybe a lawyer acquaintance who was a relatively young man and things were kind of slow in this day or more precisely there was a recess in this this guy was having a trial he was conducting your tour he was one of the attorneys in the trial and he so there's a recess and this guy is young and full of energy and he was he consider himself something an athlete in fact a wrestler and so he got in a wrestling match just during the the lunch break with this other guy this townsperson and they're wrestling and they're rolling around on the ground and this guy rips his pants and so he then he okay the judges back the the trial continues and he stands up before the court and as he turns to address the jury it's really clear he's got this big hole in the bottom of his pants and so the other men of the bar who was sitting around unbeknownst to the guy they decide to take up a contribution to buy him a new pair of pants and they silently send this the subscription sheet around the courtroom and it comes to Lincoln and Lincoln was always rather thrifty with his money and he didn't want to give any money away for causes didn't require it and so he declined to contribute and he said he just wrote instead I cannot contribute to the end in view so when Lincoln would introduce himself to audiences in one of his sort of coming out speeches for the new Republican Party Lincoln began his political life as a wig but the Whig party declined early in his career and it was replaced by the Republican Party and the Republicans held their first convention in Illinois Bloomington Illinois and Lincoln attended and he wasn't that well-known he he was somewhat nobody needed to introduce himself to the group there and so he began by saying that when he was coming he was riding his horse to the convention he encountered a woman on the road was coming the other way and the woman stopped him and said sir I believe you are the ugliest man I have ever seen and Lincoln says well I responded when you were what could I say I said well you know this is the way a God made me and I know sorry but I don't have any seats for that and she said well okay but the least you could do is have stayed home so on another occasion Lincoln sort of watch Elise a Lampoon his appearance when one of his political opponents drew described him as two-faced and Lincoln said to face you've got to be kidding you think if I had another one I'd wear this one Lincoln used to use tumor to warm up audiences but he also used humour to get him through the dark days of the Civil War Lincoln the members of Lincoln's cabinet very often groaned when Lincoln would start to tell a story because they knew these stories would go on and on and there was business to be done and sometimes the stories had a point a moral for example at the end of the Civil War when Jefferson Davis was on the run and nobody could quite figure out what to do with him Lincoln did not want to try him for treason Lincoln wished that the the Davis problem would simply go away Lincoln was all in favor of a very speedy and lenient reconstruction but he was he had to have sort of some policy about what to do with Confederate leaders and so we haves asked mr. president what should we do and Lincoln said well it brings me in mind of of this Baptist that I used to know and this Baptist was quite opposed to the use of any alcoholic beverages he would not go near the stuff but he came down with a fever and his doctor prescribed a certain dram of whiskey once a day and the Baptist couldn't decide whether to follow his conscience or the doctor's orders but the Baptist finally concluded he came up with a solution and so he told his wife he said there's a Punchbowl over there and if unbeknownst to me you could slip a little a bit of that whiskey into the punch then I could drink it in good conscience and all would be well well says Lincoln if somehow mr. Davis could slip out of the country unbeknownst to me then much of our problem would go away the institution of the presidency changed dramatically at the end of the 19th century in the beginning of the 20th century through the 19th century the president and the presidency were not at the center of American political life they were not expected to be by the Constitution Congress is supposed to be was supposed to be the leading institution the president was simply the chief executive he would execute the will of Congress and most presidents of the 19th century followed that model they're only a couple really of 19th century presidents that people remember Andrew Jackson Abraham Lincoln maybe I don't know Thomas Jefferson if you like him James Polk has his fan club but for the most part presidents the 19th century are unmemorable by design but things change in the 20th century when and because the United States for the first time has a full-time foreign policy I've written about 19th century presidents and when I write about a presidency I sort of have this idea because I started writing history in the 20th century about Dwight Eisenhower's presidency and so I think that there's got to be a lot on foreign policy so when I was writing about Andrew Jackson when I was writing about Ulysses Grant I think well it's got to be at least a chapter on foreign policy but there's really not that much foreign policy it's only in the 20th century when the United States becomes a world power that the United States has a full-time foreign policy and then the president has to take charge the president is commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces and he's the de-facto diplomat in chief for relations with foreign countries and it's in the 20th century that the presidency takes center stage in American politics where it remains and so the presidency rewarded people who had these big personalities these people the kind of people who would arrest your attention when you walked in the room the first president to fit that mold the one who really set the model for modern presidents which Theodore Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt was one who really did sort of take up all the air in the room when he came in and his daughter Alice who had some of this in herself and who knew her father very well said if you want to understand my father you have to remember that he has to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral and and so this is Theodore rose oh the odd thing is and maybe this isn't so odd given that sort of personality but Roosevelt Roosevelt could not appreciate jokes told at his expense he never made Roosevelt himself didn't tell jokes but most presidents eventually would get to the point where they would learn to laugh when people made jokes about them because that was the easiest way of dealing with it Roosevelt had to train himself to do this there was one moment when Roosevelt won a theater Roosevelt considered his most important accomplishment as president to be getting the Panama Canal under construction this was his contribution to world history he said well to get it going Roosevelt essentially had to foment a revolution in Panama to break Panama free of Columbia and under international law or even ordinary codes of ethics it was highly problematic but Roosevelt convened a cabinet session to basically convince everybody in the cabinet that he had done the right thing and so after he gave this long explanation as to why it needed to be done and how was just the right terms his Attorney General guy named Philander Knox stood up and said mr. president really you should not let such a great accomplishment as this be tainted by any whiff of legality Roosevelt didn't laugh the other members of the cabinet did but I will I have to give Roosevelt credit for this Roosevelt was one of the first presidents to be the target of other people's humor in a particular form editorial cartoons and editorial cartoonists had a field day with Roosevelt because he had features that were easily caricatured he had the glasses he had the mustache he was always sort of just full of himself and saying bully and delighted and there were various cartoonists who would skewer Roosevelt and Roosevelt either to his credit or maybe to his shrewdness would respond by writing a letter to the cartoonist the person who wrote the cartoon and said oh I got a great laugh out of it which he didn't and he said and I liked it so much could you send me the original now nobody ever knew what happened to the originals but it was his way he he understood that he needed to do this even though it came hard the presidency where the presidency would continue to evolve and the biggest evolution of the presidency as it relates to this question of humor and how presidents portray themselves is the development of the modern mass media and in fact Roosevelt and those editorial cartoons the reason that they were so popular and so effective was that Roosevelt was the first president in the age of the modern mass newspaper of the penny press technological developments in the printing industry made it possible for newspapers to be printed and sold for a penny newspapers in the middle of the 19th century were like expensive magazines today and ordinary people didn't read newspapers you had to have a certain threshold of income but by the beginning of the 20th century everybody could read newspapers and so the president and this also contributes to the rise of the President as the center of American politics reporters can with great difficulty tell stories about a large group like Congress but it's only with great difficulty it's really tempting for reporters to tell their stories about a single individual and if you have a charismatic and arresting individual like Roosevelt then it's easier to tell stories about and so as the expectations changed as the technology changes the system selects for those characteristics as an aside but it's not really an aside one of the things that I one of the principles that I've gradually inferred from my study the presidency is sort of for better or worse and this applies to whether you like the president or not we get the presidents we deserve and I say this quite literally because we chose them now maybe you didn't choose this particular president or that president but this is the best method anybody's come up with for selecting presents basically we have this vote we could argue about the electoral college that's one of those that falls into the category if it didn't exist nobody would invent it today but it does exist and this is where we are but anyway so once these expectations develop for presidents presidents adapt themselves to them and they they become the the kind of the candidates who can live up to the expectations Harry Truman Harry Truman was somebody who never would have been president if the only way to the White House was through the front door but Harry Truman was one of several presidents who became president by virtue as a consequence of the death of his predecessor and when reporters when Harry Truman became president he told reporters I'm gonna be as straight talking as I ever was before I became president and Harry Truman was really unlikely present he was he was a creature of one of the last urban political machines the the Pendergast machine in Kansas City and he was known primarily as a political hack but he was loyal to Franklin Roosevelt and Roosevelt needed a new vice presidential running mate in 1944 here's a reminder sort of in telling this story and observing this story I'm reminded how much things have changed over time in what we expect of our president is also how presidents and their running mates are chosen so we we live in a time when presidents whoever gets the nomination of the party gets to choose often without consulting anybody else consider Sarah Palin or even Dan Quayle without telling anybody else this is my choice that was not the case for most of American history most American ISTE the presidents were told this is going to be your running mate because of the leaders of the party had the interests of the party at heart and they needed to balance the ticket geographically and by age and by various other things so the Democrats told Roosevelt in 1944 you got to get rid of your current vice president Henry Wallace it was clear that Franklin Roosevelt was not in good health there was this real concern especially among conservative Democrats that Roosevelt would die in office and leave Henry Wallace the last of the hardcore new dealers as president of the United States and so they threatened to mutiny at the 1944 convention so Rosa says all right just get that guy from Kansas City it hardly met Harry Truman but Truman became present anyway so Truman becomes president and he says that he's gonna be this straight-talking guy and he did hold press conference and this is actually another important part of the story through the Truman era presidential press conferences as they were called were off-the-record events these were for background the president could be quoted only with his explicit permission so when Harry Truman hold press conferences he would say something or other and reporters would have to say can we quote you on that nowadays of course we live in this age of utter transparency if a president even says something inadvertently it's considered fair game Truman discovered that there were limits on his candor when he was thinking aloud saying in the middle of the Korean War yeah maybe we'll use nuclear weapons and then he said can we coach on that yeah we can coach you and so that makes the headlines in the world all of a sudden is alarmed that is going to be this nuclear war so Truman doesn't have sort of that much in the way of sort of quotable jokes but I'm going to share a story with you this is Truman once he got out of the White House he discovered that he could be freer with what he was saying I have a very good friend who lives in Austin who grew up in Kansas City he grew up in Kansas City in the 1950s and he recalled visiting the Truman library the second of the presidential libraries after the Franklin Roosevelt Library and so he goes to kantha his his school make takes a field trip to the Truman library and my friend Greg is he's a third grader and they're all trooping out of the bus to go to the library and who should they see but former president Harry Truman who lived just several blocks from the library had an office in the library every morning he'd get up and had walked to the library and he would talk with the people on the way this is he didn't have social security in the way and he would talk to the people and so he started chatting up this group of third graders and he saw Oh kitties so uh so what do you know about history and what do you know about Pollock's Truman the last president not to have a college degree but he prided himself on his knowledge of history because he read a lot so he was quizzing the kids and Truman liked to show off how much he knew about history so he was gonna quiz the third graders and demonstrated he knew more than a third grader when one fody said it was this and my friend Greg still just shakes his head and puzzlement at this so he saw Greg says the president stopped and he said okay kiddies I've got a question for you now you probably know that both the House of Representatives and the Senate have various committees and they deal with issues and and in each of the houses there's a committee that deals with our relations with other countries now in the House of Representative it's called the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the Senate it's called the Committee on Foreign Relations kitties do you know why the Senate Committee is called the Committee on Foreign Relations and Greg and the other third graders have no idea what to say and Truman says it's because senators are too old to have affairs anyway so I looked I looked for good jokes told by Dwight Eisenhower Dwight Eisenhower was pretty straight ahead guy and the best I could come up with is Eisenhower's definition of an atheist you know it Eisenhower his definition of an atheist is he says it's somebody who goes to a football game where Notre Dame plays SMU and he doesn't care who wins okay I'm running out of time so I'm gonna tell you I got to tell you a story about Lyndon Johnson I've actually got a couple more Reagan stories I could tell you but I'll tell you about Lyndon Johnson and this is one Lyndon Johnson it's not at all clear that Lyndon Johnson had much of a sense of humor so stories were told about Lyndon Johnson rather than stories told by Lyndon Johnson but here's one that does capture the essence of Lyndon Johnson and it's told of the 1960 Democratic campaign for the nomination for president and Linda Johnson has thrown his hat in the ring and the other two principal candidates are Stuart Symington a senator from Missouri and John Kennedy a junior senator from Massachusetts and the three men are sitting in the greenroom ahead of this debate they're about to have a debate they're sitting the green why the green rooms are called the green rooms I don't know I've been in lots of them and not one of them has been green but nonetheless they're sitting there and they're making small talk and Kennedy says Stewart Lyndon I have to tell you something something very strange that happened to me I had a dream last night and in my dream God reached down from heaven and tapped me on the shoulder and said Jack you're my boy this is your year you are going to win the Democratic nomination you are going to be the next president of the United States what do you think of that so Stuart Symington looks at Kennedy Symington sort of the model of a senator central casting in Hollywood have said ah this tall square-jawed guy with this great mane of white hair and he looks at the much younger Kennedy and he looks at Johnson he said Jack I don't know what to tell you because you see I had a dream last night and in the dream God reached down from heaven and tapped me on the shoulder and he said Stu for your long and faithful service you are going to be rewarded you will win the Democratic nomination you will be the next president of the United States so Symington looks at Kennedy looks at Johnson Johnson looks at the other two now when I tell this story to my students in Austin where the Johnson library is located I ask them how many of you have been to the Lyndon Johnson library which is there and any of you by any chance been to the Lyndon Johnson library okay it's unusual among presidential libraries in greeting you before you go in is a life-size statue of Lyndon Johnson and I invite my students to do this for especially those who have who think they have ideas of a career in politics one of the ways to determine I think whether you might be good at a career is to measure yourself against people who actually do that career do that occupation if you think you want to be a teacher you know follow a teacher around if you think you want to be an engineer think about a lawyer a doctor see what they do on a daily basis so I tell the students who think maybe they want to go into politics I want to be present go over there stand in front of that statue look Lyndon Johnson in the eye and see how you measure up one other reasons I tell them this is that the statue of Johnson's very lifelike and some of you will have a mental image of Lyndon Johnson but he had this he had an unusually large head and he had really big ears and by this time he had kind of jowls and when Johnson would get sort of invested in something that he was saying he would often shake his head in this case he did shake his head and those big ears would flap a little bit and the jowls would kind of you know the waves would go on the jowls and this is what he did and he said Stewart Jack I don't know what to tell you because you see I had a dream last night and I don't remember tapping either one of you on the shoulder okay I'm gonna stop there I'm gonna stop there and see if there are any responses any questions and so we'll see where we go I certainly don't want to overstay my welcome questions any reactions yes sir in the back what do I think of Saturday Night Live yeah okay that's a really hard question to answer in any way that will get general assent so a lot of it depends on how much you dislike the president because Saturday Night Live which started airing during the presidency of Gerald Ford and Gerald Ford was the first victim of Saturday Night Live and Saturday Night Live really did change the context for presidential humor because it was the first regularly scheduled satire spoof on presidents and in a certain sense it was an equal-opportunity caricaturist and satirist and so it really didn't matter what the politics of the president were they the the cast on Saturday Night Live went after whoever happened to be in the White House because their business was to get laughs and to sort of make fun of presidents but it really did it raised the bar for a president's ability to roll with a joke and so Gerald Ford Gerald Ford was quite unfairly lampooned but in fact Lampoon's are always unfair they're a great of exaggeration in Ford's case it was an entirely mischaracterization so Chevie chase was the one who's part of the original cast of Saturday Night Live and he used to do the stumble down the the steps of Force One and you know pull the tablecloth off the table and and do all this clumsy stuff giving out the impression that Gerald Ford was this stumblebum when in fact Ford was probably the best athlete when the most graceful individuals to occupy the White House and Ford could have tried to dispute this characterization of him but he was shrewd enough to realize it would have been a waste of time so he basically grinned and bore it but there was one particular occasion I don't remember exactly the context where he had a chance to make a little bit of a comeback now again this is this falls in the category of you might need this punchline explained but I'm gonna go with it anyway so Chevy Chase has been lampooning Gerald Ford for some while and the two of them meet on some particular occasion and and Chevy Chase sort of wants to let Ford know that this is all in good fun and so he says Gerald Ford you are really actually a very good president and Ford without missing a beat says and you Chevy Chase are a very funny suburb but I will tell you four for my money for my money the best presidential Saturday Night Live connection is one that goes full circle with Dana Carvey and George HW Bush so Dana Carvey became famous for his characterization of Bush and Bush's sometimes sort of telegraphic style of speech and while Bush was president he you know he would smile yeah that's funny funny so after he left the White House he no longer had to do that but George HW Bush I had the honor and the pleasure to encounter him in a few times I used to teach at Texas A&M at the George Bush school of public service and so I got to meet him he would come to my classes and and he always struck me as one of the most decent individuals to occupy the White House and the most I had no idea that he had this sense of humor and this capacity for humor but he was this not long after he left the White House and about the time that his Presidential Library was opening and school was opening at Texas A&M he gave a closed-door address to students at Texas closed door in the sense that the press was not allowed and one of the things that presidents often have a hard time with him and George HW Bush really had this problem when the press was around he sort of had act presidential and so he often came across as kind of wooden Lyndon Johnson had the same problem and but once there he knew there were no reporters in the room and there were no cameras he could just sort of let himself go and he did an imitation of Dana Carvey imitating himself and I have to tell you this audience of students these were undergraduates and they you know they had no particular opinion of George Bush one way or the other but they were almost literally rolling in the aisles and finally Barbara Bush had to pull out the hook and say get him out of here he's not he's not a comedian so that's what I remember about and presidents other questions reactions yes okay so circling back to your initial talk about the president this president and George Washington assuming that's like humor lack of humor that's this similar characteristic so could you expound on that a little bit yeah so one of the striking things to me about President Trump is his what shall I say his lack of an observable sense of humor and and not even any attempt to fake it I would have said I would have said before President Trump was elected course I would have said a lot of things I had very different expectations about changes in the presidency and I sort of thought they were unroll of a Keable that these changes were permanent and I had to change a lot of that but every president really from about well definitely from John Kennedy or you could say to even earlier than that had to at least fake a sense of humor and sometimes it meant just laughing and the jokes people told about you sometimes it would be telling jokes yourself and so presidents would sort of do this sort of thing and I assumed and it just sort of seems it seems logical that if you want to get the support of people you try to do stuff that will make you likable and make you popular and every president did and presidents very often Barack Obama for example I mean often it plays into this stereotype however false the stereotype might be in and in one of his last speeches before the National correspondents Club where presidents for a long time they would give their sort of their Johnny Carson Jay Leno monologue sort of thing and in Obama at this case he showed before and after picture of him so here he is as president and he's got a lot of gray hair and here he is before he becomes president and he says I add those days when I was a strapping young Muslim socialist but Donald Trump has definitely took a different route to the White House and I'm not I wasn't quite so surprised at the different route to the White House because he was the ultimate of the anti-establishment candidate and he was essentially playing into people's anger people's anger at the establishment and Donald Trump liked to liken himself to Andrew Jackson as the anti-establishment candidate and president I think that there's less similarity between the individuals Trump and Jackson then there is in the people who voted for them in both cases it was a rejection of this entrenched elite and the people who voted for Andrew Jackson against John Quincy Adams were very much of the same mindset as the people who voted for Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton Hillary Clinton was clearly the candidate of the establishment and Trump was the outsider and so the idea of sort of mobilizing that dissatisfaction that anger as part of the campaign I didn't find surprising I was surprised that it actually worked as well as it did but but then I was surprised when there was and I would say until now there still has not been any effort to broaden the base of people who chose him and President Trump has I don't know if this is a deliberate decision or if it's just he operates on gutting instinct and he seems to and it got him to the White House so you can't say that's not worth anything but he seems to be content with appealing to his base and not really trying much to broaden the base and if that's what your any holds rallies he holds political rallies this is something no president no sitting president did in fact few presidents even before they were elected few candidates would hold the kind of rallies but the idea of holding the rallies after you've been elected is something brand-new and he's seen and the point of the rally seems to be to keep stoking that dissatisfaction with the status quo Ronald Reagan did it to a certain degree even after four years as President Reagan ran tried to run as the anti-establishment candidate it's boy if you can pull it off it's great but it's hard to pull it off after you've been at the center of the establishment as president so I don't know if this is a new model so president Trump has been able to accomplish what he's accomplished with no observable sense of humor now again I don't know if he's a funny guy and tells jokes to the family or other thing other people but he seems to make at least so far make little or no effort to do it as president now is this something new or is this an aberration as I get asked questions about the meaning of the trump presidency fairly often and my answer is to take the historians dodged and say that it's too early to tell and as I like to say historians can really run with that a long way so Edward Gibbon who wrote six male in a six-volume history of the decline and fall of Roman Empire which was published in the late 1700s and it was describing events that had happened a thousand years before and he was once asked so what's what is the lasting significance of Rome and you know what he said too soon to tell well but I can give you a date a precise date on which it will be no longer suit too soon to tell and that is election day 2020 and the reason I say this is that presidents who make a lasting mark on the American political system who are elevated into the ranks of really important presidents are exclusively those presidents who get reelected the presidents for whom voters have a chance to vote on their performance presidents get elected the first time on the promise and promise is one thing you can be a persuasive promise er but it doesn't always pay off and maybe you don't deliver on your promise you change your mind or something so I'm not gonna say that anybody can get elected on the promise but you can get elected on promises and not follow through you get reelected on the performance and any president who puts himself and they're all hims until now puts himself up for reelection basically is asking for well in a British context that this would be a vote of confidence and if voters reelect you by however small a margin even if the second go-around in 2020 should be with a minority the popular vote we've got this set of rules and if under those rules you win then that says the American people liked what you did now does it mean they like what you did in an absolute sense in an ideal world no they only like you better than the person you're running against but that's the standard in every election nobody gets to run sort of against you know nothing you run against somebody else and often votes are negative votes we don't like the other scoundrel worse than this idiot so but but nonetheless if Donald Trump should get reelected gets a second term then pretty much all of the changes that he is he and now has he's announced and changes to American foreign policy changes to American domestic policy those will have C received the ratification of voters and so then people like me will have to say all right something new and potentially permanent is going on if for whatever reason he does not get a second term if he runs and is defeated in the general election if he's challenged in the primaries and loses should he resign or be impeached and convicted if he doesn't get a second term then it will be entirely possible to say okay this was a one-time thing and it represents the state of mind of voters at this particular moment because for me whether it has to do with humor whether it has to do with attitude sort any number of things presidents are less important for what they are then for what they represent and one of the things they most represent is they are barometers of the political culture as I said before we get the presidents we deserve and if voters say we like this new dispensation and we and it goes on then there will have been this effective change of mind in the American political culture and the American electorate and that is something that that will be of lasting importance so if you ask me in December 2020 I will no longer be able to say too soon to tell please invite me back but but maybe let's make it what do we say April 20-21 Barry may okay very good thank you very much you've been a wonderful audience thank you all

Channel: Hauenstein Center

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Keywords: H.W. Brands, Hauenstein Center, GVSU, Presidents

Id: tEd2n2OtztE

Length: 79min 17sec (4757 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 13 2019