Looking for Mr. President

By Frank Trippett

Tall, stately John Connally of Texas "looks like a President." So wrote stocky, rumpled James Reston in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago. Since the assertion was right out of the Political Writer's Handy Kit of Solemn Banalities, it could be conscientiously forgotten. It probably will not be, so the question lingers: What does it mean?

The U.S. is eternally looking for somebody who supposedly looks like a President. Once again, the presidential field is prematurely swarming with contenders and pretenders, each selling a face and figure as heaven-sent for White House display. But how is one to judge? If the nation had a vivid idea of what the presidential look should be, political parties and voters alike would be saved considerable uncertainty.

Such a concept, alas, is not easy to come by. Political commentators have been more preoccupied with contrived presidential images than with actual looks. Some lofty thinkers even feel that the look of a President is of little significance. In reality, a leader's countenance and mien have always been of great moment to the led, and a President embodies an epic load of national symbolism. Externals have become ever more crucial since ubiquitous television has taken over as the main medium of campaigning. Today, as Daniel Boorstin notes in his book The Image, "our national politics has become a competition for images or between images, rather than between ideals."

If the founding fathers knew what a President should look like, they kept it to themselves. A President, says the Constitution, need only be a native-born resident and old enough (35) to be dry behind the ears. The law is mute on the shape and size of those ears and other elements of physiognomy, stature and hirsuteness that go into the chimerical mix of looks.

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 and in his second race, as Joe McGinniss documents in The Selling of the President, he paid much attention to such minutiae as makeup and stage gestures. Said the candidate to one TV cue man: "Now when you give me the 15-second cue, give it to me right under the camera. So I don't shift my eyes."

Still, who could say with certitude that Nixon did not look like a Chief Executive and that Kennedy did, or vice versa? Is a President clean-cut? Ulysses S. Grant would have fit right in at an Allen Ginsberg poetry reading. Trim? Honest Grover Cleveland's dreadnought corpulence might have served as a model for Thomas Nast's potbellied crooks. Is the presidential face august, humane, agleam with probity? John Adams might have been cast as Scrooge or a consecrated bookkeeper. John Quincy Adams looked incipiently satanic. James Monroe's bug-eyed visage might have got him 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."

Physical peculiarities kept none of those gentlemen from the highest office, but some of them might have had a 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.

Granted the dizzying diversity of looks in the gallery of past Chief Executives, how is anyone to know what an ideal President should look like? The odd truth is that Americans do know. But how? What picture of a President resides in the popular imagination? What, in short, is the operating archetype?

It is not necessary to enter Carl Jung's collective unconscious and search among primordial archetypes (the great mother, the old man) that supposedly lurk there. It seems reasonable enough to suppose that Americans test the looks of would-be Presidents against an accumulating folkloric archetype, a fluid and ambiguous composite formed of several diverse figures.

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.

Certainly, more than the faces and physiques of the greats have lent contours to the archetype. It is premature if not fatuous to say that any man looks like a President before he has done the job. Sixscore years ago, many voters thought that one candidate was much too awkward and homely to fit the task.

He was, warts and all, Abraham Lincoln. Some time later, the majority of the electorate agreed that handsome, silver-haired, courtly Warren Harding looked every inch a President. His name lives still as a synonym for scandal and ineptitude. Ultimately, any President's face takes on mythic and symbolic significance only as a result of character--and deeds.

--Frank Trippett

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