A history belle's pick of presidents
So, here we are on Presidents Day in Washington, the city hushed on the holiday. Picture me on the porch looking over my personal A-list.
George Washington receives visitors at his Mount Vernon plantation by the river, but, reader, he was never my type. George dresses and dances like a dream yet hardly murmurs a word in company or to a lady he's waltzing with. Just looks like a Roman general on and off his white horse. The horse is always white.
Since I'm such a history belle, let me be as becoming as Scarlett O'Hara, surrounded by a sea of presidential beaux. Like Scarlett in "Gone with the Wind," there's one I truly love more than the rest, but I can't let on right away.
Onto the porch came a Princeton man, conceited about his charms while wooing women. Born in Virginia before the Civil War, he expected me to reach for smelling salts with his fine lines.
But I happen to know he let women suffer out on the streets for suffrage - votes for women - by the White House. He let women get arrested and abused in jail for protesting our ban from American democracy. Pity.
No, Woodrow Wilson can't fool me with gallantry and love letters. He was no friend to women. He was no friend to black people either, making the federal government a Jim Crow workplace. He's Old South, not my kind, dear.
Have you noticed the presidential historians club is always men? (Though they let Doris Kearns Goodwin in.) I'm here to change it up and judge the march of men in the Oval from the opposite sex's vantage point.
Among the presidents I like best, as a woman, are Franklin D. Roosevelt and Bill Clinton. Both were fatherless and close to their mothers. Their temperaments had room to understand us and to marry strong women: Eleanor and Hillary were bold statements in choosing their wives. The presidents each enjoyed the company of women - and I mean that beyond the affairs they had.
Roosevelt and Clinton each had a certain beguiling charm. Franklin's jaunty voice alone helped see the nation through the Depression with Fireside Chats. For my Wisconsin grandmother, a widowed nurse with four children, those consoling radio chats were like lifeblood. Being in a wheelchair, seldom mentioned, also gave Franklin a sympathetic streak, insight into humanity.
Franklin's relative, Teddy Roosevelt, was a hunter, warrior, a ruggedly masculine man - beloved by men (before we could vote). His expression, "Bully!" is not exactly enthralling.
John F. Kennedy and Thomas Jefferson are much exalted by the history set. The man from Massachusetts and the sage of Monticello were brilliant, sophisticated, the envy of mankind.
Jefferson grieved greatly when his wife died and then had a slave mistress who was his wife's half-sister the rest of his life. Kennedy had many affairs - or conquests - before and during marriage, few of the heart. They lived to impress other public men.
Now we come to my Ashley - and Rhett. There's only one president for me. He's not a Virginia gentleman with sleek graces and wealth from enslaved people. No, he rose from the prairie.
Abraham Lincoln was the first president born an outsider, not of the original 13 states. With sad eyes, rough edges and a Kentucky drawl, lanky Abraham was dirt poor, nobody's catch, believe me.
But he literally stood out in the crowd. The tallest president. With a way with words.
What caught my eye and ear was that the country giant knew "Macbeth" by heart. He recited his favorite play on the porch. Shakespeare taught him how to speak in public. People came from hither and yon to hear him speak in court and then in debates, running for office. He made them laugh, telling stories like nobody had before.
Lincoln was the first president to show humor - irony and other jests. And he made townspeople weep. At the Springfield train station, he said farewell like poetry in the rain, knowing he might never return from the Civil War brewing in Washington. He freed 4 million souls and foresaw his tragic end, straight out of Shakespeare.
Still to this day, he disarms me.
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