Heather Cox Richardson:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now and Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today, we’re going to talk about a topic which, to be honest, came up a little while back, not that long ago, but a little while back, there’s been so much happening in the news that by this point there were probably 800 different things we could talk about in this episode. But the thing that struck us and it still has relevance was the moment during a January 6th Committee hearing when Trump campaign aides, Jason Miller and Bill Stepien said that Rudy Giuliani was inebriated on election night when he encouraged Trump to go ahead and declare that he had won the election.

What struck us at that moment was just thinking about the role of alcohol in politics, about what that says about what we expect of our leaders, about what that says about what at a given time period is acceptable or unacceptable, how that changes over time. So in one way or another, we’re interested in exploring over time the ways in which alcohol has or hasn’t mattered in the realm of politics and political leadership. Now, I’ll say right here at the outset that in talking about this, we don’t want to make fun of alcoholism. We’re not trying to poke fun at drinking in any way. We’re not passing judgment or making commentary in that way on the topic of drinking in this episode.

What we’re interested in is how alcohol and drinking bumps up against our assumptions and expectations of political leaders and what we accept in them and what we don’t.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And one of the reasons it came up was because it jumped out to us that for all that alcohol has had such an extraordinary impact on our society, we don’t talk a lot about its role in our politics. And once we started thinking about that and the fact we don’t talk about it in our politics, the number of instances where it mattered and where we had run across it in our work was really astonishing. So we stepped back and went, “Oh, we really ought to grapple with this because in some ways.” It’s kind of the elephant in the room that has to do obviously with this moment we’re in but more generally has to do with our expectations of our government, our leaders and our society I think as well.

So the other thing that was fun about it was that when we came up with this idea, to us, I won’t say it was obvious, but it was pretty clear we both wanted to talk about it. And Joanne instantly said something that I did not know. And what was funny about it was the next day on Twitter, one of the people who follows the two of us said, “Wow, I expect your next episode is going to be on alcohol in history and obviously you’re going to have to talk about the exact same thing Joanne said, which was Franklin Pierce.”

Joanne Freeman:

Franklin Pierce, indeed. That was the first thing that came out of my mouth.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I had no idea it was common knowledge that Franklin Pierce’s political career was all about alcohol. I truly did not know. And I know Franklin Pierce better than your average bear. So can you walk us through-

Joanne Freeman:

Your average Pierce.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s right. So can you walk us through the issues with Franklin Pierce?

Joanne Freeman:

Franklin Pierce, above and beyond his impact on national politics in the 1850s, at a point when it really mattered, generally speaking, Franklin Pierce from New Hampshire and clear at a young age he was gifted, he was ambitious. He makes it big in local politics. He’s just 24 where he is elected to the New Hampshire House and becomes speaker two years later. He then goes to the House, US House of Representatives. He goes on to the Senate. So he’s someone who clearly was a person going places in the realm of politics, but he also clearly had some kind of an issue with alcohol, which at the time, particularly when he was in Congress, wasn’t necessarily discussed a lot. Because actually, Heather, as you were just saying before when we were talking about this episode, there was a lot of drinking in this time period. There was a lot of drinking in the 19th century and particularly the first half of the 19th century and particularly in Washington, DC.

In Washington, DC in 1830, the city granted almost 200 liquor licenses for porterhouses, hotel bars, dram shops, groceries. Some of them, you bought drinks. Some of them, you got sort of a gulp size portion. There was massive, massive amounts of drinking in this time period and Washington was particularly prone to it because it was often a city of bachelors.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and in 1830, the city of Washington was about the size of my kitchen, right? So 230 liquor licenses is a lot.

Joanne Freeman:

Maybe a little bigger than that but yes. And some of these 200 liquor licenses are literally almost places that are big enough for you to walk in and get a gulp of alcohol, then leave and nothing close to what we now would call a bar. So alcohol, there was a massive amount of alcohol, but Pierce, as a heavy drinker, was among many other heavy drinkers. Where this really became an issue for him is when he runs for president in 1852. He was a surprise candidate, a dark horse, wasn’t expected to be a candidate and what becomes an issue, not necessarily because drinking is a big issue at this point, but because it was seen as a vulnerability that people could capitalize on.

So we know, for example, there’s an anecdote about him during his Congress years getting drunk and going to a theater with two friends and raising a certain amount of mayhem. The reason we know that anecdote is because during the campaign, someone went up to a friend of Pierce’s, name is Henry Wise of Virginia. He was a “friend” of Franklin Pierce. And so during Pierce’s campaign for president, someone says to Wise, “Well, what about this alcohol thing? People say that he has a drinking problem. I mean, is he fit to be president if he has a drinking problem?” And why supposedly responds, “No, no, no, no, no Pierce doesn’t have a drinking problem. As a matter of fact, I only saw him drunk once.” And then he regales whoever asked him about this with this anecdote about him being wildly drunk while he was in Congress, so this did not help Pierce very much.

You can see, just looking at newspaper coverage of Pierce in the leading up to the election, the degree to which people were focused on this. So for example, here’s an announcement from the New York Tribune, June 10th, 1852, when Pierce is announced as the surprise candidate and the New York Tribune wrote, “At about half past 2:00 last Saturday afternoon, all here were thrown into great confusion by the telegraphic report that our neighbor, Frank Pierce, had received the nomination at the Democratic Convention in Baltimore. Not a man in Concord could believe it. What an idea, Frank Pierce, the ‘hero’ of many a well-fought bottle, a candidate for the president of the United States, a more immoral dissipated man, never walked off streets. He was obliged to leave Washington when a senator there because he was almost continually intoxicated,” which is not true.

And in this case, Pierce’s supporters protested and the Tribune took it back, saying, “General Pierce is certainly not a temperance man in our sense of the term, but we know nothing with regard to his habits, which should expose him to public reprehension. We regret that the illusion of our correspondent appeared in our columns.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Can I ask you something about that though because I’m interested in the way this whole idea of drinking too much is constructed in what it says? And in this quotation from the New York Tribune, it says he was immoral and dissipated. And I wonder if their objection is that somebody who is intemperant is morally dissipated, he doesn’t have good morals, that somehow they draw a line there or that they’re concerned about putting that kind of power into the hands of somebody who doesn’t always have control over himself or that they’re worried about the bringing of the presidency into disrepute. What are they really upset about aside from the fact he’s a Democrat?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, it’s about being able to claim immorality because this is the age of temperance and being able to claim that you have control over yourself, you’re a temperance man or woman. So some of it has to do with morality and claiming that he’s immoral, but I think some of it also has to do with the fact that he’s just not fit for the presidency, which was said at the time.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We have discussed this, as historians do, the fact that our buddy Frank doesn’t seem to have led a life in many ways that reflected the lives that people thought lawmakers should lead. So for example, his wife was part of the temperance movement, and clearly, I believe while he’s married to her, he’s out starting a fight with guns at a theater with his buddies drinking. Does this just shorthand for, “Oh my God, this guy’s way out there”?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I do think it has something to do with morality and character because another thing that people would grab at, and this goes all the way back to Jefferson’s election, people accusing people of cowardice. And if they had military service, you knew they weren’t a coward and that meant that you would be fit for the presidency because you had had military servants. So in some way or another, some of this has to do with claims about character and sort of grasping at straws as a way to condemn someone’s character. So I think that’s part of what’s at play here. And I think some of it also has to do with the publicness of it, right? It’s not like he’s at home drinking. I think part of what people are objecting to is that he is seen by others publicly as being dissipated which is another kind of a vulnerability.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He does have military service, but they managed to undercut that as well, right?

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah, they make fun of that because he was in the Mexican War and his horse fell on him at some point in a battle. And apparently, some part of his saddle hit him in a rather personal spot for a gentleman and he fainted because of the pain. And that became a joke. That became an ongoing joke. I think he was called Fainting Frank during that election, so they tried to poke fun at his military service as well. So yeah, in one way or another, they’re smacking at his character as a way to suggest he’s not fit for office.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And then you have to tell a story about his son.

Joanne Freeman:

Oh, it’s a horrible story. So Pierce, he’s that dark horse candidate in early 1853, he had just been elected. It’s a month, two months after he had won the presidency and he and his family were traveling from Boston back to Concord, New Hampshire by train. And on the way, a broken axle on the train sent several cars tumbling over an embankment. And there were people hurt. If I remember correctly, there was only one person killed and that was his son, his 11-year-old son, Benjamin Pierce, who suffered a horrible head injury. Obviously, Pierce and his wife Jane really never fully recovered.

So he came into the White House after all of this smacking at his character and the campaign. When he came into the White House, people were quite respectful of him because he came in after facing this extreme loss. Ultimately, he is blamed in some ways for what happens with the South. He’s very Southern friendly in his politics at a moment when that actually made a difference. And he spends his last years back in New Hampshire being somewhat neglected and dies of cirrhosis of the liver. So that’s a story in which alcohol plays a variety of different roles and certainly none of them are good.

Joanne Freeman:

Hey, folks, we are all focused on the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but we also want to highlight an important event that’s ahead that deals with another crucial constitutional question, also in the news, the role of guns and the Second Amendment.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So Warren G. Harding was a newspaper man in Ohio when he became a Senator and he was not terribly remarkable in any way. He gets the nomination for president largely because there are so many candidates and nobody can agree on anybody else. And in fact, there’s this wonderful scene where people have introduced their favorite son characters at the Republican National Convention that year. And literally finally, like there are pages and pages and pages of these nominations and nobody gets excited about any of them, finally someone goes, “Well, we could ask Harding.” And everyone’s like, “Yeah, whatever.” And I’m exaggerating a little bit, not by much, his nomination speech is literally not a full page.

Anyway, so he is the president who’s going to oversee the enforcement of prohibition because he takes office in 1921. So initially, he didn’t like the idea of prohibition. He had voted against the Volstead bill when he was a senator, but he agreed to it finally because he thought that state ratifications would mean that it would never actually get through and become the 18th Amendment. And when in fact states did the opposite and ratified the bill, Harding got on board. When Woodrow Wilson tried to veto the Volstead Act, he overwrote the veto, Wilson, of course, a Democrat and Harding was a Republican, because he needed the support of the Anti-Saloon League when he ran for office in 1920.

Joanne Freeman:

And there you go, the relationship between campaigning and alcohol that now he’s using the issue in a campaign.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, yes. And what’s interesting about that is that he quite deliberately says one thing in public that is that he supports prohibition and castigates people who continue to drink publicly, and yet at the same time, he is famous or infamous for having parties upstairs in the White House where people continued to drink and Harding himself continued to drink privately. He was a real womanizer and his mistress at the time who was 22 years old, she was a woman named Nan Britton wrote in her tell-all in 1927 about a time in which Harding met her in a New York hotel and tried to secure a bottle of champagne.

She said, “Of course, prohibition had already gone into effect, but I was told it was possible still to obtain liquor or wines if one knew how to do so. And evidently Mr. Harding thought he did.” And he was famous, as I say, for these parties where people just drank and smoked and played poker. Another woman, Evalyn McLean, who at one point owned the Hope Diamond, who was a really close friend of Harding’s wife, a woman named Florence, wrote in her memoirs that Harding was accustomed to breaking the laws about prohibition. She said, “I knew that Warren Harding was counted as a dry senator, but that in moments of relaxation, he was ready to drink. Indeed, I often heard him boast that he could make a champagne cocktail just like the Waldorf bartender.”

Joanne Freeman:

He’s counted as a dry senator. He’s drinking a lot really obviously, and these accounts that you’re talking about, Heather, are people in later years thinking back and saying, “Oh, yeah, he was drinking a lot in private company,” but he made that sort of temperance prohibition stand in public. Is he ever called on this in any way or does he happily go through his career being the guy who drinks in private and is counted as dry in public?

Heather Cox Richardson:

He never gets called on this. So what’s interesting about this is he is, in many ways, acting differently in private than he does in public. He talks a lot for example, about how important morality is in the country at the same time that he’s producing a child with his mistress. In fact, he was such a womanizer that there were rumors when he died probably of heart failure on a trip out to the West Coast that his wife had poisoned him. She did not, but there were plenty of rumors about him, but what’s interesting is they count him as a dry senator because of his vote.

But that’s one of the reasons I really think his story is interesting and that what it illustrates to me is a moment in our history in which there were members of the Senate and then later on of the White House who were acting in a way that completely contradicted what they had put in the laws. So the little people were not supposed to drink, but it was okay for them to drink. And even Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who was Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter and really a handful, she said, “Though violation of the 18th Amendment was a matter of course in Washington, it was rather shocking to see the way Harding disregarded the Constitution he was sworn uphold. No rumor could have exceeded the reality. The study was filled with cronies, some of the regulars and others. The air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with bottles containing every imaginable brand of whiskey stood about. Cards and poker chips ready at hand. A general atmosphere is of waist-coat, unbuttoned, feed-on desk and spittoons alongside.”

And what she is talking about is the White House during prohibition. In our Constitution, you weren’t supposed to drink and they’re having parties upstairs in the White House. And to me, in that case, what alcohol means is a real divorce between what the lawmakers do and what they say everybody else should do, the acceptance that, “We are kind of better than they are.”

Joanne Freeman:

It reminds me of the people I write about in an earlier period who are dueling and dueling is against the law and they’re dueling anyway and getting away with it. And the lawmakers, they are helping enforce or create the laws against dueling and they are dueling. In a way, it shows that they are elite, that they can do this.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That they’re above the law, literally above the law, by being upstairs in the White House. And it really emphasizes not only the class aspects of prohibition which essentially meant that people with money could get liquor and people without money were out of luck and an attempt to clamp down on poorer people and immigrants. It also emphasizes the idea that certain people really were above the law.

Joanne Freeman:

And Alice Roosevelt actually acknowledged this disconnect in her memoir. She wrote, “If any group of men ought to have lived up to the law, it should have been the members of the official family, the cabinet and private secretaries. Yet during the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations, the cabinet member who did not take a drink when it was offered to him was an exception.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Which makes the next material we wanted to talk about a really interesting change in both our society and our government. And that is moving us forward into a period when Americans demanded that they and their leaders both answered to the same law.

Joanne Freeman:

Perhaps most famously, when you’re thinking about politicians associated in one way or another with drinking in excess, that brings us to Teddy Kennedy. Senator Kennedy clearly had a lifelong drinking problem. It was one that occasionally was seen publicly. Supposedly, he was seen in April of 1969 flying back from a congressional trip to inspect living conditions of impoverished Alaskan Native Americans. He was wandering up and down the aisles, chanting about “Eskimo power” and rambling in coherently about his brother Robert’s recent assassination. And so he was seen at least by aides already as being very much drunk to the point that it was a problem.

Three months later on July 18th, 1969 in an event that almost certainly was influenced by alcohol, Kennedy drove away from a party on Chappaquiddick Island off Cape Cod with 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, who had worked on Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign and Kennedy apparently accidentally drove off a wooden bridge into a tide-swept pond. And although he escaped the submerged car, he could not get out Kopechne and swam back to his hotel and did not tell authorities about what had happened until the next morning. So by that point, certainly she was dead. She had drowned.

Now the Chappaquiddick incident temporarily ended Kennedy’s aspirations for achieving the presidency, but he remained in the Senate. So it’s not as though that happened and it instantly ended his career nor is it as though that ended his drinking in public and to excess in a variety of other places as well and other modes as well, sometimes, again, involving inappropriate conduct with women. There is someone who is very much associated with alcohol and drinking excessively and it just became part of his identity or part of his character more than anything else. There’s a quote from Orrin Hatch who defended him by saying, “I found him to be a vulnerable human being who has a very good side to him. I think he has some bad sides too, but there is a good side to him that I choose to look at.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Again, what interests me about the Chappaquiddick incident in this context that we’re talking about today is that it didn’t ruin his career. It’s hard to imagine even in 2022 when so much seems to just go that that would not have been a career-ending event. What I wanted to contrast that with was Wilbur Mills because by 1974 the conversation was changing. And think about what’s happening politically between the ’60s and the ’70s where people are starting to say, “Hey, hang on a minute. We’re tired of you people making rules about us little people and telling us to get on board.”

So in 1974, a congressman named Wilbur Mills, who was democratic, he was from Arkansas, gets embroiled in a sex scandal and the sex scandal is going to reveal that he’s got a drinking problem. But he’s a really interesting character because Mills was the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee. That’s pretty much the most powerful position you can have in the House of Representatives aside from speaker because it is what handles all the money essentially. He’d been a congressman for 18 terms and this meant that he was responsible for tax legislation. So he’s an enormously powerful person.

The year before the scandal happened, he had begun an affair with a stripper named Fanne Foxe, known as the Argentine Firecracker. And as this affair progressed and as he had back surgery, he began to drink more and more heavily. And finally, on the morning of October 7th, 1974, 2:00 in the morning, two US Park Service police officers stopped Mills for speeding with his lights off near the Jefferson Memorial. And when the officers came toward Mills’ car, Fanne Foxe jumped out of the car and jumped into the Tidal Basin for about a 10-foot drop in there. When they pulled her out, she had two black eyes and Mills had lacerations on his face. There were two other people in the car who were also clearly inebriated and there was, of course, as always happens in places like Washington, a television cameraman nearby and he captured the whole thing on tape.

The police didn’t file charges. They declined to file charges. And Mills later said he was helping an ill neighbor. But 10 days after the incident, he admitted that he had been drinking. He said, “I did something I shouldn’t have. I drank some champagne when I knew it went to my head quickly and it did.” Well, it, of course, then snowballed. The Washington Post reported that Foxe and Mills had been seen arguing at strip clubs for the last several months, and finally, a very powerful house Democrat is later going to be speaker, Tip O’Neill defends Mills, even though the evidence starts to mount. He says, “It is hard for me to believe that Wilbur would be involved in anything of that nature. Maybe he was just the victim of circumstances.”

So here, we’ve got a powerful political operative protecting one of his most important congressmen in the House to try and protect the legislation that he wants to get through.

Joanne Freeman:

And protecting him, to link it back to some of what we’ve said by saying, “Well, it’s not about him. This doesn’t say anything about him and who he is. He’s just quote ‘a victim of circumstance’. You can’t judge him as a man or his character. He’s just in these unfortunate situations.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

But then he did something that I think illustrates Mills’ sense that he can get away with whatever he wants. He literally holds a press conference in Fanne Foxe’s dressing room. And when he is asked about what this is going to do to his political future, he answers, “This won’t ruin me. Nothing can.”

Joanne Freeman:

When you’re watching a TV show and someone says something like that, “Oh, this won’t ruin me. Nothing can,” you know that the next scene will be the person being ruined horribly, right? It’s almost like a dare like you’re tempting the fates.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And what happens after that is that he resigns his position on the Ways and Means Committee and he checks himself into the Bethesda Naval Hospital to work on his substance abuse issues. But this actually plays out in a really important way on the ground in the sense that the House begins to strip the Ways and Means Committee of some of its power because they’re concerned about having people like Mills in power, but then it turns out that Mills later gives an interview in which he says, “I would go for days at a time and not remember what I had done, especially 1974. I don’t remember much of 1974 at all.”

And then he goes on to blame himself for ruining one of President Nixon’s last attempts at sweeping domestic legislation. And that piece of sweeping domestic legislation was a national healthcare coverage proposal. The proposal was called The Assisted Health Insurance Plan. It was a centrist proposal that had an employer mandate and gave direct assistance to anybody who’s unable to pay for insurance. And it had already been negotiated by Mills and Senator Edward Kennedy from Massachusetts. And Mills later said that he thought he could have pushed through the legislation had he not had an alcohol issue. He said, “I had President Ford convinced on national health. I could have passed it on the floor, but hell, I couldn’t get the committee to go with me. They had never failed to do that before and I know now it was because of my drinking that they didn’t.”

The idea that his substance abuse issues took from us a Republican-backed program to have national health insurance in 1974, to me, was, we were talking about whether or not to do this episode, was like this isn’t the elephant in the room. We need to talk about this because it has affected our politics and it is affecting our politics.

Joanne Freeman:

So around the same time, Mills says that he couldn’t conceptualize the idea that a congressman could be an alcoholic. He said, “I never did have that realization until I proved it to myself. I couldn’t have it because congressmen don’t get to be alcoholics, not me.” Now that to me is really fascinating. He’s saying from the outside that’s not something that congressmen get to do. It’s not something I expect in congressmen. And as historians, we dream for someone to step forward and say the sort of thing that Mills said there and what you just quoted, Heather, actually saying, “This is why I think this didn’t pass because I had a problem with alcohol.”

But the fact that he himself said that he couldn’t quite conceptualize drunken congressman shows you the degree to which on the one hand that idea of alcohol and people in power still has, and then particularly growing in this period, a major stigma attached to it on the one hand. And on the other hand, it’s very much there. There’s an interesting divide between what people expect and what they see and conceptualize in the public when it comes to people in power, particularly on this national platform.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And the reason I think this period we’re talking about is so interesting is because the American people say, “Hey, you are people like the rest of us and we’re going to hold you accountable, in this case not only to social norms but also to the laws.” This is 1974 when Nixon’s going to have to resign for allegedly breaking the law. He never went to court obviously, but that idea that what we’re really talking about when we talk about alcohol in this context is not so much alcohol itself in the political sphere as the sense that lawmakers can get away with whatever they want with impunity. And there are times when they can and there are times when the American people say, “Now hang on just a minute.”

So after all this happens, Gerald Ford takes the presidency. Gerald Ford was accustomed to having a three-martini lunch. He was in this old boy’s idea that, “This is just how we do business around here.” And his aide took to taking his drinks away from him. He’d put them down and the aide would come and get them. And they finally sat him down after he had been giving a speech in Denver and he’d actually skipped a dozen pages of his speech because he had been drinking at lunch and he didn’t recognize that he had missed a whole bunch of the speech.

And finally, the White House physician went to him and said, “You’re president of the United States. Stop drinking, especially stop drinking martinis at lunch.” And Jimmy Carter hinted at that when he would go on the stump and castigate things like the three-martini lunch, assuming that the people who have three-martini lunches are the people who are acting on us rather than with us.

Jimmy Carter (archival):

Another one that’s very important is the business deductions, jet airplanes, first class travel, the $50-martini lunch.”

Heather Cox Richardson:

Of course, as we all know, people pay attention and Gerald Ford admits he as a drinking problem and starts a whole set of new clinics.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, right, that’s what I was about to say. You could see the expectation on my face.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah, exactly.

Joanne Freeman:

Who is it? You totally did. Who is it at this moment who steps into the public, makes a confession and has an impact? Makes a confession of behavior that’s very similar, but is doing it very publicly? And of course, that’s Betty Ford. In April of 1978, she announced that she was addicted to prescription pills. Shortly thereafter, she announces that she was an alcoholic. She went to seek rehabilitation at the Naval Regional Medical Center in Long Beach, California. At the time, the director of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare’s National Institute of Drug Abuse, that’s a lot of words altogether, actually said along the lines of what we’re suggesting here with Betty Ford, “I believe the nation is going to go through a major change because of this. Mrs. Ford has made a big contribution. There are hundreds of thousands of other Americans who need this rehabilitation.”

And she’s actually asked about this by Barbara Walters, the famous interviewer who could make people cry, right? There was always a thing, if you get interviewed by Barbara Walters, you’re going to cry. That’s not the case here, but Barbara Walters did say to Betty Ford-

Barbara Walters (archival):

The toughest part for you was to admit that you were an alcoholic.

Betty Ford (archival):

The alcohol was something I selected by choice. I thought how much more do they expect of me. I’ve been public about everything and now they want me to suddenly be public about this, about being an alcoholic. And they said, “Until you admit it publicly, you will never start to get well.”

Joanne Freeman:

We told all of these stories in this episode about men in power doing things behind the scenes, sometimes being called on them more often than not. Who is it that steps forward and has changed? It’s a woman. It’s the wife of a president. Now that leads me in several different directions, right? On the one hand, she is not the formal powerholder, so that maybe gives her a little bit more room to step forward and do this. On the other hand, part of me also says, “Well, of course, a woman steps forward and assumes this kind of responsibility for a public failing.” And she does it in a way that ultimately does bring change, but it’s striking that after everything we’ve talked about here, particularly she’s married to someone who has an issue, she’s the one who steps forward and institutes change.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and it’s especially powerful considering that the issue of alcohol consumption is going to become very public. Again, when George H.W. Bush announces that he is nominating John Tower, who is a Republican senator from Texas, as his pick for the Secretary of Defense. Now the FBI had already turned up evidence that Tower was a heavy drinker, that he had engaged in a number of affairs during the breakup of his marriage in the early 1980s and a Democratic senator from Georgia, Sam Nunn, wanted to uncover the extent of Tower’s drinking and sexual transgressions, so he pushed the idea of another FBI check and it turned up even more issues with alcohol than they already knew.

So Tower actually goes on morning talk shows to say that if he was confirmed, he would stop drinking, which is just mind boggling that that is the answer to this political question we’re talking about. He says, “I have never been an alcoholic nor dependent on alcohol. However, to allay any fears or doubts on this matter, I hereby swear and undertake that if confirmed during the course of my tenure as Secretary of Defense, I will not consume beverage alcohol of any type or form including wine, beer or spirits of any kind.”

Joanne Freeman:

Reminds me of Franklin Pierce.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, yes, totally.

Joanne Freeman:

That reminds me of what Franklin Pierce, basically does the same thing, right? “Well, I’m going to be president. I’m going to be a temperance man. I’m not going to drink at all. You won’t be able to see me doing that.” It’s the same, it’s very similar kind of logic and now you could be assured, it’s all good.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it first seems as if he’s going to manage to pull that off and yet on March 9th, 1989, the Senate rejected Tower’s nomination by a vote of 53 to 47, largely along party lines. It was actually the first time in American history that a cabinet nominee by a new president had been rejected and one of the things that they talked about was concern about putting at the spot of Secretary of Defense a man who had shown in the past issues with alcohol consumption. And he was furious about this. He says-

John Tower (archival):

No public figure in my memory has been subjected to such a far-reaching and thorough investigation nor had his human foibles bared to such intensive and demeaning public scrutiny.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It does not that just summarize everything that we’ve been talking about, he goes on to say, “Have I ever drunk to excess? Yes. Am I alcohol dependent? No. Have I always been a good boy? Of course not, but I’ve never done anything disqualifying. That’s the point.”

Joanne Freeman:

He’s drawing a line here at a time when the world changed, he’s actually held accountable. And even in that moment of accountability, he thinks it’s unfair, right? “What just happened isn’t fair. It’s not what normally happens. They’re being unfair to me.” The world has changed. Standards has changed. He is being held to a different standard, but even in that moment, he’s trying to draw lines again and again and again between what’s acceptable and what isn’t, what he can do and what others perhaps can’t do. And at different moments in time, that line is in a very different place.

By this point in time, you have things like Mothers Against Drunk Drivers which starts out in 1980. You have very different views about alcohol and society and you have, here at least, a degree of accountability, which I suppose he was right in saying, “I haven’t seen this before.” He’s not the first, but you could totally see how expectations of leaders and what people are willing to accept in people who have power has shifted, certainly from where we began with this episode.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That word accountability, I think, is central to what we’re talking about because to bring us back now to the people saying that Giuliani on the night of the election was just telling former President Trump to go out in front of the cameras and announce he’d won, even though he hadn’t and then people saying, “Well, he’d had too much to drink,” and him saying, “No, I didn’t.” Isn’t in part he was simply saying, “I don’t care what the voters wanted. We, here at this level or in this building, get to do what nobody else gets to do. Not only do we get to drink upstairs with the poker players, not only do we get to ignore prohibition, not only do we get to go ahead and sit on the Ways and Means committee while we’re unable to put through legislation, we also get to decide who won the election”?

And the fact that people like Miller were like, “Oh, we ignored him because he was drunk,” I think is a really interesting blame shift, kind of, “We didn’t take it seriously, but we did take it seriously,” there’s an awful lot going on with that.

Joanne Freeman:

Along the lines of what you’re saying, Heather, the fact that he thinks, “Well, we can do whatever we want because we can, because of who we are,” think about what he’s saying by protesting, not to the fact that he wanted to falsely declare the election done, what he’s upset about is that he was called drunk. And he publicly came forward, right? “I was not drunk.” He doesn’t come forward and say, “No, I did not illicitly call for the end of the election.” That’s okay. That’s acceptable. That’s typical behavior. He just doesn’t want to be accused of being drunk, so he wants to be in his right mind when he makes that extraordinary statement. He doesn’t want to blame it on the fact that he had had too much to drink, that talk about a mixed message and a lot of things banging up against each other. That’s, when you unpack it that way, it’s a really interesting statement.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What is the relationship here between social norms and power and alcohol and the use of it in politics both in reality and in rhetoric seems to be more illuminating than perhaps even we thought when we started this episode.

Joanne Freeman:

Illuminating about where society and politicians draw lines between what’s acceptable and what isn’t and about what it is that they feel accountable for.