Presidential Campaigns

Campaigning for the presidency demands strength and courage. Teddy Roosevelt was once shot in the chest just before a campaign speech--but he insisted on delivering his hour-and-a-half oration anyway. Presidential nominees have to know how to play the game, moreover, whether they care for it or not. When Andrew Jackson was visiting one town, according to a campaign tale, a proud mother handed a dirty-faced baby up for him to hold. "Here is a beautiful specimen of young American childhood," said Jackson obligingly. "Note the brightness of that eye, the great strength of those limbs, and the sweetness of those lips." Then he handed the baby to his friend John Eaton. "Kiss him, Eaton," he cried, and walked away. And all presidential hopefuls have to find ways of smoothing over the unfortunate gaffes they sometimes commit. During the 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton provoked so much mirth when he said he once tried marijuana but found he couldn't inhale, that he subsequently appeared on television to play his saxophone and told the host he took up the instrument because it didn't require inhaling: "You blow out." Now, in a revised and updated edition, this enlightening and endlessly entertaining book unveils the whole history of American presidential elections from Washington to Clinton--those clamorous showdowns that have so perplexed, pleased, amused, irked, and fascinated the American people from the very beginning. As Charles Dickens observed, American voters are scarcely finished with one campaign when they start in on another.