What Were They Like, Really?

Two men revered on this day and what do we really know of them?

One had smallpox scars on his face and a mouth full of rotting teeth, but still cut a dashing figure in his uniform.

Women thought him sexy--as long as his lips were closed.

He was the most popular figure of his time, and yet he could be sober and silent and suck the oxygen out of a party merely by walking into the room.

He was obsessively civil and restrained.

He loved Shakespeare and fishing.

He took dancing lessons as a teenager.

He never actually said his most famous words (“I cannot tell a lie”).

He was thin-skinned.

Fame so preceded him that he and his entourage could sweep into a Southern house, be served a fine breakfast and learn only later that the place was not an inn, but a private home.

He was tormented by failure to sire children, blaming his wife, though she bore four in her first marriage.

Still, he fathered a country.

And the other?

He wore size 14 shoes.

He thought himself an ugly man. His cheeks were leathery and flabby, his ears extremely large, his face sallow, cadaverous, shrunk, shriveled, wrinkled and dry--all this according to a close friend. (Detractors called him a baboon.)

He was the most beautiful writer ever to occupy the White House.

He, too, loved Shakespeare, memorizing long passages.

He couldn’t dance a lick, but shot a good game of billiards.

He was irresistibly funny and particularly enjoyed jokes about body functions, once telling such a story about George Washington.

He was the most powerful man in America, yet turned ashen, his voice quivering, over what the people might think of his failures.

He was prone to nightmares, depression and fatalism, and anticipated his own death.

He freed the slaves.

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George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are consistently ranked by scholars as among the three greatest presidents of all time (Franklin Delano Roosevelt being the third).

Washington, for historians, was the “Indispensable Man” guiding a fledgling America through revolution and constitutional rebirth and serving two terms as president. When some thought he could become monarch for all his popularity, Washington wisely relinquished power, allowing the infant nation a chance to go it alone.

Lincoln grappled with one unresolved evil--slavery--left standing by Washington and the other founders.

With each passing Presidents Day, the images are faded by time and the hucksterism of car and furniture sales.

“In democracies, vulgarity is a form of honor,” complains Richard Brookhiser, author of “Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington” (the Free Press, 1996).

Yet, what were they like--really?

Historians seems to agree that Lincoln was a funnier guy than Washington. The National Father could, from time to time, appreciate a clever remark, but rarely deliver one. He used to laugh at the witticisms of Benedict Arnold--at least up to a point.

By comparison, Abe was a crack-up.

There was the time he and Secretary of State William H. Seward were strolling down Pennsylvania Avenue and saw a sign that read, “T.R. Strong.” The president pointed and, in his high, squeaky voice, suddenly burst out with a non sequitur: “T.R. Strong, but coffee are stronger!”

Lincoln told a story about Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen visiting England after the conflict and finding people there trying to ridicule Americans by hanging Washington’s portrait in bathrooms. As Lincoln tells it, Allen found the practice quite understandable, since “there is nothing that will make an Englishman [defecate] so quick as the sight of Gen. Washington.”

Only, Lincoln didn’t use the word “defecate.”

An unscientific poll of comedy writers finds Washington out-yukking Lincoln as a figure from history.

“You always have to go with Washington,” says Jon Macks, who writes for “The Tonight Show.”

“He had wooden teeth. He had hemorrhoids. He was married to a woman named Martha. He threw a dollar across the river. He chopped down a cherry tree. . . . I mean, he’s standing up in a boat!”

“The problem with Lincoln, of course, is tragedy,” says Mark Katz, who writes humor for President Clinton. “That being said, one of the first rules of comedy is tragedy-plus-time -equals -comedy. Which is why the joke ‘Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?’ is so funny. In 1866, that joke wouldn’t have been that funny. . . .”

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Unlike Washington, who actually did wear wooden dentures, Lincoln had a beautiful set of choppers in a large mouth and liked to laugh long and hard.

“His face lit up . . . and he looked like a different human being,” said David Herbert Donald, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lincoln” (Simon & Schuster, 1995).

Washington was most relaxed entertaining at his beloved Mount Vernon. He could even kid about himself there, as when he noted his change of behavior after countless invitations to pose for portraiture. At first, Washington wrote, “I was as impatient of the request and as restive under the operation as a colt is of the saddle. The next time, I submitted very reluctantly, but with less flouncing. Now, no dray moves more readily . . . than I do to the painter’s chair.”

Both men were physically striking: Washington at 6-foot-2, 175 pounds; Lincoln, at 6-foot-4, 180 pounds, the tallest president. Both had surprising physical strength. Lincoln was the only president ever to come under fire in a battle zone, once when the capital was under rebel attack. Washington probably saw more combat in his life than any president except perhaps Andrew Jackson. Abe was good on horseback. George was superb.

Washington’s second inaugural was the shortest ever, at 135 words. Lincoln’s second inaugural was the best: “With malice toward none, with charity for all. . . .”

Both anguished in their own ways, over the defining crises of their day.

When the founders were accused of hypocrisy for allowing slavery to continue in the so-called Land of Liberty, some slave holders, notably Thomas Jefferson, tried to rationalize. But Washington, notoriously self-controlled, remained silent, quietly making plans to free his own slaves and finance their future care and the education of their children out of Mount Vernon resources. He was the only slave-holding president to take this action.

In the bleakest days of the Civil War, when news of the latest in a lengthening line of Union Army debacles reached the capital--this one, the humiliating rout at Chancellorsville, with 17,000 federal casualties--an ashen-faced Lincoln paced the White House, his voice trembling. “My God! My God!” he said. “What will the country say! What will the country say!”

In the end, many agree that it is easier to poke fun at today’s crop of presidents than the towering figures of Washington and Lincoln.

“They rose to a moment in history, they didn’t avoid it,” says Los Angeles screenwriter Gary Ross, who wrote the 1993 presidential film comedy “Dave.”

“They were driven by their convictions. They didn’t try to be all things to all people. . . . That’s something that’s missing right now.”