“In truth a president is never truly on vacation and never ‘away’ from the office,” George H.W. Bush, a vigorous and enthusiastic vacationer, once declared. “His responsibilities follow him day or night, wherever he goes.”
Escapes, retreats and vacations have added a wide range of stories and a wealth of images to the history of the presidency.
The images include: John F. Kennedy at the helm of a sailboat; Ronald Reagan on horseback; Jimmy Carter on a softball field; George W. Bush jogging in the Texas heat; Gerald Ford skiing; Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton and Obama teeing off; and Harry Truman shedding blue-suit formality for a blaze of brightly colored Hawaiian shirts, the symbol of his laid-back vacations at Key West, Fla.
Theodore Roosevelt jolted the presidential vacation out of a comfortable rut by taking a full, working staff with him to Sagamore Hill, his summer White House at Oyster Bay on Long Island, New York. In the summer of 1905 Roosevelt used that staff and a global communications network to broker an end to the Russo-Japanese War. His efforts won him the Nobel Peace Prize.
But the irrepressible Roosevelt also earned a newspaper scolding that summer when he boarded the USS Plunger, one of the Navy’s earliest submarines, and disappeared for nearly an hour beneath the surface of Oyster Bay. The president had absolutely no right, the New York Times told readers, to risk his valuable life in a “new fangled, submersible, collapsible,” clearly dangerous device.
Americans were enthralled in 1886 when President Grover Cleveland married a beautiful and much younger woman in a White House ceremony. Aiming to satisfy intense public curiosity, a trainload of reporters followed the newlyweds on their honeymoon.
Years later, Cleveland used the pretext of a vacation cruise on a wealthy friend’s yacht to conceal emergency surgery to remove a cancerous growth in his mouth. The operation succeeded. His secret safe, the president quietly recuperated in the privacy of his Cape Cod summer home.
Calvin Coolidge’s 1927 summer vacation in the South Dakota’s Black Hills produced two of the most amusing photographs ever taken of any president. The first shows Coolidge in the cascading feathers of a Sioux war bonnet. In the second he’s wearing full cowboy gear with his nickname, “CAL,” emblazoned on the chaps.
There have been sad chapters as well as amusing ones. Franklin D. Roosevelt died at his Warm Springs, Ga. retreat. An assassin shot President James A. Garfield as he prepared to board a train for his first White House vacation.
So give President Obama a break: All vacationing presidents have dealt with the issues and events of their times while relaxing away from the White House. Some made history. Others merely caught up on sleep or cleared their heads. Either way, the republic survived.
Read more: politico.com |
