Ike and Carter: A White House Without the Soul of Wit

In recalling the humor of modern Presidents, I overlooked Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

As for Ike and Carter, neither was remarkably witty. Ike was more given to fulmination than to wit, and Carter inspired more humor than he made.

Even his mother contributed. When told that Jimmy was going to run for President, she asked, “President of what?”

In “Presidential Anecdotes,” Paul F. Boller Jr. says, “Carter’s critics regarded him as essentially humorless.” “He never told a joke in his life,” said a congressional leader.

It is recorded, though, that on a visit to Egypt, a guide told him it took only 20 years to build the Great Pyramid, and Carter said, “I’m surprised that a government organization could do it that quickly.”

When a reporter asked how he would feel if told that his daughter was having an affair, Carter said, “shocked and overwhelmed,” since his daughter was “only 7 years old.” (One wonders what John Kennedy would have said.)

Ike could inspire nervous laughter, but rarely belly laughs. When his speech writers tried to exaggerate his folksy image, Ike said, “Well, I’m folksy enough as it is, without their trying to make matters worse.”

As president of Columbia University, Ike had to attend numerous dinners and follow numerous speakers. Once, introduced late in the evening, he discarded his speech and said, “I am the punctuation--the period,” and sat down. He said it was one of his most popular speeches.

Certainly it was better than many of his public statements, which were masterpieces of confusion and impenetrable syntax. If Ike had given the Gettysburg Address, a reporter once said, it would have begun, “I haven’t checked these figures, but 87 years ago, I think it was, a number of individuals organized a government setup here in this country. . . .”

Lyndon Johnson’s wit could be cruel. His ego was transcendental. When Johnson was walking toward his helicopter, a Marine guard said, “Mr. President, this is your helicopter over here.” Johnson replied, “They’re all mine, son.”

Johnson drove his people hard. He was unrelenting in his expectations. “I don’t have ulcers,” he said, “I give ‘em.” An aide said, “Lyndon has a clock inside him with an alarm that tells him at least once an hour to chew somebody out.”

Occasionally he allowed his favorites to tease him. At lunch once his press secretary, Bill Moyers, was saying grace. The President said, “Speak up, Bill, I can’t hear a damned thing.” Moyers said irreverently, “I wasn’t addressing you, Mr. President.”

In casual references to the branches of government, Johnson’s proprietary attitude often showed. He called the Supreme Court “my Supreme Court” and once referred to “the State of My Union Address.”

It was Gerald Ford’s fate to be the butt of jokes, although he was not humorless. One evening when the Mexican-American singer Vikki Carr sang at the White House, Ford escorted her to the front portico. “What’s your favorite Mexican dish?” she asked the President. “You are,” he replied.

“If Lincoln were alive today,” Ford once said, “he’d roll over in his grave”--a remark that probably made more sense than it seems to.

A lifelong athlete, Ford lost his footing on a plane ramp in Austria and tumbled to the ground. This accident inspired a thousand jokes about his awkwardness, and his every misstep was gleefully reported. Ford took this abuse with good grace.

He was more hurt by jokes about his intelligence. Johnson’s remark that Ford had “played football too long without a helmet” was hard to ignore. At a Gridiron Club dinner Ford brought a helmet that he had worn in an All Star game in 1935. He tried to put it on but couldn’t get it over his ears. He explained that “heads tend to swell in Washington,” referring obviously to LBJ. Brought the house down.

Alas, the wittiest man of the century was never elected President. Adlai Stevenson could hardly speak without wit and satire. Many thought, in fact, that it was his wit, and his intellect, that doomed his candidacy.

Typical of his scathing wit was his remark that “Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump for a speech on conservation.”

Stevenson worried that the nation had lost its sense of humor. but he was optimistic. In “The Fine Art of Political Wit” (Bell), Leon A. Harris quotes Stevenson on the subject:

“I’m a great believer in cycles. I think probably the sense of humor in the United States, which is one of the most precious things we have, one of the indispensable qualities, one of the most indispensable ingredients of life, if you please, may return.”

Don’t hold your breath.