All the Presidents' Pets Read Free Page B

stinging from Lesley Stahl’s barbs, I sucked it up and committed myself to soldiering onward. Phil was still watching Bush dropping Barney—from three news angles now and with on-air analysis from Bill Schneider.
    â€œSo, Phil,” I said optimistically, “I figured since we’re here, we may as well get a few sound bites from the conductor on the status of the split in the track outside Metropark. It could become a big story.”
    Phil shot me a look of unalloyed contempt. I whimpered.

3
    There’s Something About Harry
    (and all our other presidents)
    The only good part about being back in Washington was that I’d be near the White House. And the White House is where the President lives. Allow me to digress for a moment . . .
    The President. The Commander-in-Chief. The Chief Executive. POTUS. Maybe I was fascinated by the office because I’d been raised in D.C., a mill town like L.A., where the President was the undisputed number-one star. Other kids might have become blasé but not I. Staring at the White House was magical, like looking through the gates of Paramount Studios.
    It seemed that the office had worked a kind of alchemy on all its forty-two occupants. (George W. Bush is the forty-third President because Grover Cleveland’s nonconsecutive terms are counted twice.) In each case, the presidency took a man who seemed ordinary and transformed him into something more. Silent Cal Coolidge was no longer boring; he was stoic. Taft was no longer fat; he was robust. Clinton was no longer an adulterer; he was popular with women voters. Even George Washington, already a god among men, grew still larger than life in office. Had he never been President, he would have still been “First in War,” maybe even “First in the Hearts of his Countrymen.” But without the “First in Peace” part, the whole quote would have fallen apart.
    Cynics believed that a presidential mythmaking machine was at work, serving the American public’s need, in the absence of royalty, to believe, say, that Warren Harding was a 1920s Abe Lincoln. (Warren Harding did have the biggest feet of any president—size fourteen and a half. That has to count for something.) They believed that the White House press corps aided and abetted this myth.
    Perhaps it was no coincidence that the first modern all-powerful President, Teddy Roosevelt, had an especially close relationship with reporters and gave them their first pressroom inside the White House. He did this, the skeptics claimed, so that he could manage the flow of information more easily and control the way the American people perceived him.
    But honestly, could anyone deny that TR
was
nearly superhuman? Through a hail of bullets this former asthmatic ran all the way up Cuba’s Kettle Hill without stopping for breath. (That’s right, Kettle Hill. San Juan Hill gets all the credit, but it was a lot less important.) This was no whitewashing.
    Sure, the press might have been tricked or bullied by the White House on occasion. In
The Boys on the Bus,
journalist Timothy Crouse described the Nixon-era White House press corps members as flacks, called them “handout artists.” But ever since Watergate, Presidents were picked apart from A to Z, and former Presidents were constantly reassessed. The Starr Report was excessive in book form. Did it really need to be put out as a book on tape? Though I suppose David Ogden Stiers’s narration did help class it up.
    And still my faith and, yes, awe in the transformative power of the office remained intact. Look at George W. Bush: The
New York Times
’s Frank Bruni, whom the President nicknamed “Panchito,” described a likable Bush “ambling” into office in January 2001. Nine months later, and only a week after 9/11, Bush stood atop the smoldering rubble of Lower Manhattan and rallied the nation. At the time, Bob Woodward (nickname “Woody”) compared