Warm and Witty Side of Attila the Hun (9 page)

 

A more characteristic anecdote about VP Nixon highlights his fervid imagination and paranoid streak. In 1957, President Eisenhower met with Khrushchev (and British Prime
Minister Harold Macmillan) in
Geneva
,
Switzerland
. The summit conference went very well and seemed to presage a thaw in the Cold War; but Nixon, ever alert to the insidious machinations of the hostile press (which to his mind was the only kind of press there was), was taking no chances
with negative publicity. Nixon was worried that any improvement in relations between the
US
and the
USSR
could be compared with the attempt to solve the Sudeten Crisis in
Munich
in
1938, where British Prime Minster Neville Chamberlain gave in to the demands of Adolf Hitler.

Like many Englishmen, Chamberlain always carried an umbrella, and the umbrella had
become a popular symbol of the "appeasement" policy that many said led the way to the Second
World War. Therefore, to forestall any invidious comparison between Ike and Chamberlain, Nixon saw to it that when Eisenhower returned to the US and made his scheduled statement on the tarmac at the airport, there would not be an umbrella anywhere in sight.

Of course, predictably, it was pouring rain when Eisenhower disembarked.

A photograph taken at the time shows a drenched President Eisenhower attempting to read a statement
from a soaked, sodden, disintegrating piece of paper, with an equally drenched Vice-President Nixon standing beside him, looking angrily around with thinly disguised suspicion.

 

Nixon lost the presidential election of 1960 by one tenth of one percent of the popular
vote, but he accepted his defeat by John Kennedy with equanimity. He appeared on the Tonight Show, then hosted by Jack
Paar
, soon after Kennedy's inauguration, and
Paar
asked him what he
thought of Kennedy's inaugural address.

"Well," Nixon, replied, "he said some things that day that I wish I had said."

"Such as ... ?"
Paar
prompted.

"Such as," Nixon said, "I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of
president of the United States ..."

 

Spiro Agnew, Nixon's first VP, was a man prone to ethnic epithets. On one occasion on
Air Force 2 (as it is popularly if unofficially known), returning home from Asia with the press
onboard, Agnew saw a Japanese-American journalist taking a nap, and he asked loudly, "What
wrong with the fat Jap?"

He then apologized, and the journalist of course accepted the apology. But the fact that
anger and hurt feelings remained was evidenced by the fact that as Air Force 2 approached Pearl
Harbor, Hawaii, the journalist shouted, "Bombs away!"

 

Vice-presidents have often been treated disrespectfully by presidents. The two figures are
rarely associates, and never friends. Theirs is usually a marriage of convenience, and is
frequently strained. When FDR died and Truman became president, the Secretary of War took him aside to tell him about the Manhattan Project. It had never occurred to
Roosevelt
to inform his new vice-president about the atomic bomb. When Lyndon Johnson went from being Senate
Majority Leader to JFK's vice-president, he went from being one of the most powerful people in
the country to being a virtual nonentity, and he resented not only the demotion but also the
disrespectful way many of Kennedy's people (especially the president's brother Robert) treated
him. Perhaps for that reason he mistreated his own VP, Hubert Humphrey. LBJ frequently
forgot to ask Humphrey to attend cabinet meetings, and on one occasion asked him to go and get
him a sandwich. And when President Eisenhower was asked at a press conference during the
1960 presidential campaign if he could name any policies to which VP Nixon had contributed, he
replied, "Give me a couple of weeks and I might be able to think of one."

But Reagan's VP, George H.W. Bush, had a sense of humor about his role. Reagan never
attended the funerals of foreign dignitaries, always sending his vice-president in his stead. Bush eventually mused that he should change his middle names from "Herbert Walker" to "You Die, I Fly." And during the 1988 presidential campaign, he referred to his foreign policy experience, including meetings with foreign leaders and then added, "Some of them were actually alive when I met them."

 

J.
Danforth
Quayle, VP for the first President Bush, has an undeserved reputation for
stupidity. He actually is simply inarticulate and tends to suffer from a form of mental aphasia.
He expresses complete thoughts incompletely and phrases things in such a way as to convey meanings the exact opposite of what he intended. In addition, his reputation has been injured by numerous ridiculous statements falsely
attributed him. (He did not, for example, say while visiting
Latin America
that he wished he had taken Latin in high school.)

But he did say "I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix." What he meant was that he vacationed frequently in California while he was living in Arizona. He did say, "One word summarizes what it means to be vice-president, and that one word is to be prepared." He did say, "Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child." He
did say, "The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century." And in attempting to
express his interest in political science by frequently rereading Plato, he did say, "Every year I
try to read
The Republic,"
which does not quite convey the same meaning. When addressing a
meeting of the United Negro College Fund, he garbled their slogan, "A mind is a terrible thing to
waste." "What a waste it is to lose your mind," Quayle said. "Or not to have a mind is very
wasteful. How true that it."

A particularly prime example of Quayle's unfortunate lack of rhetorical skills was a speech he gave to an assembly of NASA officials and astronauts, with the president and the first lady in attendance. He began by saying, “Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts.” He then went on to say that “Space remains a high priority for NASA”; to note that “We see what we think are canals on Mars. Where there are canals, there is water. Where there is water there is oxygen, which means we can breathe”; and to express optimism by predicting that “The future will be better tomorrow.” Of course, scientific progress depends upon quality education, Quayle said. We must support the country's teachers, because “Teachers are the only profession that teaches our children.” Our goal thus must be to have “The best educated American people in the world.”

Real
Quaylisms
abound, as numerous websites attest. This writer's favorite comes from a
speech he gave to a Thanksgiving festival in Virginia: "I suppose three things certainly come to
my mind that we want to say thank you. The first would be our family. Your family, my family—
which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles. We all have our family, whichever that may be." Sheer poetry.

Benito Mussolini reveled in his well-documented virility and amorous predisposition. When a journalist
asked him what the first thing he did in the morning, he replied, "I jump right
out of bed. No matter how lovely the head beside me on the pillow."

On another occasion, and with uncharacteristic modesty, Mussolini said, "A man in my position must be stupid at least once a day."

 

Adolf Hitler hated flying in airplanes. Benito Mussolini loved piloting them.

This led to an awkward situation during one of Mussolini's early visits to Germany.
Neither man knew the other very well, it being early in their relationship, so each was eager to
impress the other. Hitler proudly showed Mussolini a new experimental sea plane that his new
Luftwaffe
was building, and Mussolini insisted upon flying it. Hitler reluctantly agreed, and the
two dictators boarded the sea plane for a quick spin over the North Sea. The problem was that
despite his enthusiasm for flying, Mussolini was not a very good pilot and was unfamiliar with the controls of the sea plane. These facts were made quickly apparent by the way the plane lurched, dipped, rose, and basically wobbled with a nervous
Duce
at the helm and a terrified
Führer
sitting beside him. Mussolini eventually managed to land the plane and taxi to the dock. When the two dictators emerged, both were acting quite self-consciously as if nothing were
amiss, but both their faces were as white as sheets; and they then, deeply engaged in conversation
and paying no attention to their surroundings, walked arm in arm to the end of the dock, kept going, and fell face first into the cold waters of the North Sea.

 

Despite his record of bloodshed and his fondness for terror, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin was also the unsophisticated product of a small provincial city. On one occasion he was in the
apartment of Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov when he noticed a "position book" on the table, i.e., a manual illustrating a variety of positions for sexual intercourse. After paging through
it and examining the pictures, he turned to Litvinov and asked, "Tell me, Maxim Litvinov, do people really do this sort of thing?"

 

Stalin's elderly mother was equally rural, provincial, and unsophisticated, and more than
a little obtuse. Stalin had already consolidated his power and his control of the Soviet state when he had his mother brought to the Kremlin from
Tbilisi
,
Georgia
, for a lengthy visit. She returned
home sullenly content that her son seemed to be doing well, but for the life of her she could not
figure out what he did for a living.

 

One must, as it has been said, give the devil his due. Corporal Adolf Hitler was a brave
soldier in World War One, and he single-handedly captured seven enemy soldiers.

During the Battle of the Somme, the murderous clash of Germans, English, and French that lasted from July to November, 1916, and left one and a half million men dead or wounded, Hitler served as a dispatch runner. Telecommunications in warfare were very limited in 1916, and if a message had to be sent from one part of the battlefield to another, it often had to be
physically carried. This was the job of the dispatch runner, and Hitler did his duty with enthusiasm. It was a dangerous assignment—Hitler was shot at one point—but it was a vitally important one.

On one occasion, surrounded by gun smoke, fog, and the darkness of early dawn, Corporal Hitler heard a babble of voices that were quite obviously French. He was alone and armed only with a revolver, but no one could see anything, so he decided to brazen it out. He began shouting orders as if he had an entire platoon with him, and then demanded that the French drop their weapons and surrender. They did, and Hitler marched them back to German lines. For this act of bravery (not to mention bravado) he was awarded the Iron Cross.

Hitler subsequently was injured by mustard gas. One cannot help but wish that he had
inhaled more deeply.

 

 

I hate the
Schweinhund
too, but it's safer if you stand up.

 

Benito Mussolini was also a brave soldier in the First World War, also a corporal, though on the other side, of course. (
Italy
was fighting
Germany
's ally,
Austria
.) He was also wounded, but did
not discuss his injury very often. It seems that Corporal Mussolini realized that the mortar he was
firing was growing dangerously hot, and he warned the officer in charge that it needed to cool down
before being fired again. The officer stupidly ignored him and ordered another shot. The mortar exploded, and a piece of shrapnel hit Mussolini in the buttocks. He regarded such a wound as
undignified, and he rarely mentioned it.

 

Considering what was to come, a remark made by Hitler to Austrian chancellor Kurt von
Schuschnigg in 1938, shortly before the German
Anschluss
(annexation) of Austria, is
particularly chilling. Schuschnigg had been summoned to Hitler's Alpine villa for a few hours of
haranguing invective culminating in a series of demands that the Austrian chancellor felt compelled to accept. (They would all be rendered moot by the
Anschluss
.)
When the meeting was over, Hitler concluded with the following words:
"I think we have settled our relations for five years to come. But keep this is mind:
Germany today has the most powerful army in the world. Why do you think we spent all this money to create this army?
For parades?!"