Word: roosevelt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris...
Most Americans have seen history take critical turns because of appearances. Thomas E. Dewey was hurt in both his campaigns for the White House because many voters agreed with snippy Alice Roosevelt Longworth that he looked "like the bridegroom on a wedding cake." In 1960 Richard Nixon's narrow loss to John Kennedy was greatly influenced by the scenes from that famous first televised debate. Nixon was recovering from a staph infection, and his gray visage was transmogrified into a haggard, glowering, shifty-eyed mask by the same cameras that broadcast a fresh, vigorous Kennedy. Nixon learned the lesson...
...followed by the FBI in the 1960s. Martin Van Buren's sweetly cunning countenance could have belonged to a real estate shark. William Henry Harrison looked bilious. Millard Fillmore at times resembled a triumph of dishevelment. William McKinley, says Edmund Morris in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, seemed the perfect picture of a President - but only "from the neck up." McKinley also owned stumpy legs, pulpy hands and a commanding gaze that was mobilized, says Morris, by a tormented effort "to concentrate a sluggish, wandering mind...
...hard time getting there today. For Americans now even hold strong notions about the cut of a Chief Executive's clothes. Harry Truman incensed many button-down traditionalists by hacking around his Key West vacation retreat in criminally garish sports shirts. The spectacle of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the flamboyant cape and floppy hats that he loved to flaunt raised the blood pressure of old-school Republicans...
What figures? They would be the handful of Presidents whose greatness is all but universally conceded. Mount Rushmore epically displays the main clutch of them - Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt. A few more might be added -Jackson, Wilson, F.D.R. It is too soon to say which, if any, of the recent Presidents will ascend to the same folk pantheon. But the ghosts already there are quite likely astir in the elusive archetypal President...