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Our Presidents and Cigars
A White House Tradition is in Danger of Disappearing
by Carl Sferrzza Anthony
President William Jefferson Clinton may
have comfortably adjusted to the ban on smoking in the White House--it
seems he doesn't light up ... anymore. In effect, he hasn't been
banned from enjoying a cigar, just smoking it. In this way he can
avoid any accusations of inhalation, and he is still able to savor
some of a cigar's more relaxing elements.
While reports from the campaign trail suggested that Clinton did light
up occasionally, his White House tenure has been marked by two
paparazzi-type photographs of him holding unlit cigars in his
mouth. If his current reluctance to actually smoke a hand-rolled
premium cigar remains intact, Clinton will be endangering a
presidential tradition--the 196-year-old relationship between the Oval
Office and cigars.
In the early days of White House life, it was those men and women from
Southern plantations who seemed to be the greatest consumers of
tobacco in all forms. The seventh president, Tennessean Andrew
Jackson, was such a regular user of plug that brass spittoons--now in
his Tennessee estate, the Hermitage--were installed at the White
House. Virginian Dolley Madison scandalized Washington as one of the
few women to openly pinch snuff with congressmen. Still, it was
tobacco in the form of cigars that remained the choice of presidents.
Although he raised tobacco as a cash crop at Mount Vernon, there is no
evidence that George Washington smoked cigars. The first president to
enjoy a "seegar" was James Madison, the country's fourth leader, who
smoked until his death at 85 in 1836.
Andrew Jackson, and his wife, Rachel, also smoked cigars. One account
had the homespun "Mrs. General Jackson" in her rocking chair before a
warm fire, consuming "two seegars" in an evening. But another homespun
general's spouse who later became a president's wife would turn ill
with cigar smoke. So her husband, Zachary Taylor, elected in 1848 as
the hero of the Mexican War, smoked cigars only in the presence of
male companions who also smoked. Included among these was Senator
(and later president of the Confederacy) Jefferson Davis, whose
first wife had been Taylor's daughter.
Ironically, after the Civil War, it was Davis's cigar holder and
coffee maker that turned up in the White House. At an auction of the
possessions of deposed Confederate aristocrats, Lincoln's successor,
Andrew Johnson, the seventeenth president from 1865 to 1869, purchased
Davis's unusual ceramic train that held several cigars by wire and
also percolated coffee. Between the Civil War and the Second World
War, more presidents smoked cigars than did not.
Few men in American history have ever been more closely associated
with the cigar than the great celebrity of the late nineteenth
century, Ulysses S. Grant, the eighteenth president. Famous first as
the Union general who brought the Confederate Army to its knees, Grant
was a two-term president almost always caricatured, illustrated,
sculpted, or photographed with his beloved cigar. In fact, toward the
end of the war, when Grant suffered a particularly severe bout of
depression, he wrote that he was so unhappy that he was "eating
neither breakfast nor dinner" and he had "not smoked a cigar."
Grant was said to smoke 20 cigars a day. His habit increased during
the Civil War, after the Battle at Fort Donelson in Tennessee in
mid-February 1862. As he later told General Horace Porter, "I had been
a light smoker previous to the attack on Donelson .... In the accounts
published in the papers, I was represented as smoking a cigar in the
midst of the conflict; and many persons, thinking, no doubt, that
tobacco was my chief solace, sent me boxes of the choicest brands
.... As many as ten thousand were soon received. I gave away all I
could get rid of, but having such a quantity on hand I naturally
smoked more than I would have done under ordinary circumstances, and I
have continued the habit ever since."
When the general decided to run for president, his relish for stogies
was used as part of his campaign persona, and was even immortalized in
the 1868 campaign song, "A Smokin' His Cigar." The Democrats tried to
use Grant's cigar against him. One of their ditties had a verse
running, "I smoke my weed and drink my gin, playing with the people's
tin."
Chester Arthur, a wealthy New York clubman who was the twenty-first
U.S. president, from 1881 to 1885, and who was given to lavish
midnight suppers, usually concluded his meals with Champagne and
expensive imported cigars.
Benjamin Harrison smoked moderately, and during his one term, 1889 to
1893, a tobacconist from his hometown, Indianapolis, supplied the
White House with complimentary cigars.
William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president, who was assassinated in
1901, neither smoked in public nor permitted himself to be
photographed with a cigar, but in private he was nearly obsessive
about having his smoke. Recalled White House Chief Usher Ike Hoover,
"McKinley had a passion for cigars and was perhaps the most intense
smoker of all the presidents during my life. One never saw him without
a cigar in his mouth except at meals or when asleep."
As a congressman, McKinley had become a heavy cigar
smoker. Overworked, and with the stress of an invalid wife, McKinley
found his only moment of respite in an after-dinner cigar. Because
Mrs. McKinley did not like smoke, the congressman went outside on the
sidewalk to smoke, pacing up and down the length of the Washington,
D.C., residential hotel, the Ebbitt House. It became his only form of
exercise and solitude.
In the White House, McKinley smoked his cigars more
frequently. Because the second floor of the mansion then included both
the family quarters at the west end and the executive offices in the
east end, McKinley managed to have it both ways. When he was in the
office with the men, he smoked his favorite imported Garcias. When he
was with his wife in the family rooms, he put out the ashes and broke
the cigar in half, mouthing the tobacco rather than chewing it.
Three-hundred-pound William Howard Taft entered his presidency, the
twenty-seventh man to hold the position, as a cigar smoker, but he
quit while in office. Warren G. Harding, the twenty-ninth
U.S. president, was so careful about the aroma of his tobacco that he
brought his cigar humidor with him to the White House from his home in
Ohio. Harding was never photographed smoking cigarettes, but he
appeared on the golf course and in other informal settings with his
cigar. Under pressure of the Great Depression, President Herbert
Hoover "smoked incessantly," according to Ike Hoover (no
relation). "The bigger and the stronger, the better he liked them,
but they must always be a good brand. With the burdens of office, he
increased his smoking."
If there appeared to be a trend of native Ohioan Republicans--Grant,
Harrison, McKinley, Taft, and Harding--as the biggest cigar consumers,
it was bucked by New Englander Calvin Coolidge. No president used the
cigar to better advantage than Coolidge, who served from 1923 to
1929. Concious of his parsimonious and taciturn persona, "Silent Cal"
manipulated situations with dramatically punctuated use of his
cigar. When he relented into accepting a proposed nominee for attorney
general as his own candidate faced sure defeat, for example, Coolidge
did not verbally state his dissatisfaction; rather, he agreed but
"mumbled...into his cigar," according to Ike Hoover.
George Holden Tinkham, a Massachusetts state senator in the early
1900's, recalled how fellow senator Calvin Coolidge used his cigar as
a prop. Meeting at the Boston Athletic Club for the first time, both
men sat down with "fat cigars." The ambitious Tinkham was trying to
pry information out of Coolidge, and nervously bit into his cigar,
"scattering the tobacco on his smiling lips and teeth" as he chattered
away, asking the question and anticipating answers a bit too
eagerly. Coolidge on the other hand, managed to keep quiet and retain
his "Silent Cal" reputation by smoking. "Rhythmically," wrote Duff
Gilfond in Saint Calvin, "his cigar went in out of his
mouth--in and out--as if he were keeping time," revealing nothing of
substance.
Coolidge could smoke about three cigars by afternoon. On summer
nights, he often sat in a rocking chair on the darkened south portico
and smoked quietly while his wife knitted. Whenever someone offered a
cigar, Coolidge looked at it quizzically, scrutinizing its size and
shape, sniffing its aroma. From his upper vest pocket he would then
draw his own huge corona. When he offered cigars to guests, it was
usually from a box of supercoronas, each about twelve inches long, and
in one session would usually consume three himself.
As president, Coolidge held 8 A.M. White House breakfasts with
senators and congressmen, the honor of which he hoped would translate
into support for his legislative initiative of the moment. As part of
the unspoken pressure, after the plates were cleared of Coolidge's
famous Vermont breakfasts of pancake "gems" with jam and cereal of rye
and wheat, the president would nod to a servant, who entered with a
large cigar box. As the cigars were passed around, only one per
legislator, Coolidge would raise the issue of the day. However odd it
may have been for some of the men to smoke cigars so early in the
morning, no one dared turn down the offer of the president. It
afforded Coolidge a sense of control as he tartly mentioned that he
was counting on them for support.
According to Gilfond, Coolidge used the same technique when meeting
alone with a senator in the Oval Office. When a bill regulating a
proposed radio commission was before the Senate, the Republican
president called in a progressive Democrat who was opposing him on
it. The senator entered. Coolidge "squeezed" a smile looking "as if he
were going to cry" and remained seated. The silence was punctuated by
one word. "Smoke?" The president pulled out his box of cigars, which
he always kept in his top drawer of his desk. The senator shook his
head. Coolidge took one for himself, affixing a paper holder to it,
and swiveled in his chair, facing the lawn his back to the
senator. For several minutes, nothing was said. Instead, a steady
stream of smoke rose from behind the cane-back chair. The senator was
unnerved, uncertain of whether he should speak. Finally, Coolidge
broke the silence in his Vermont twang. "Don't see why you fellas
can't get together. Legislation is compromise. No reason to kill the
bill." There was compromise.
Even political philosophy was revealed in Coolidge's cigar habits. At
the least, how he acquired his cigars and smoked them reflected his
notorious thriftiness and conservative economic policies. According to
Ike Hoover, Coolidge only "smoked the best quality of Havana cigars,"
but he rarely spent his own money for them. They were, "always given
to him," Hoover said. And although the cigars were often as expensive
as 75 cents a piece--in 1920s currency--Coolidge found it practical to
always use his paper one cent cigar-holder, which he frugally saved,
day to day.
Throughout the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s, state and
private dinners at the White House often concluded with the men and
women separating, the women, led by the first lady to the Red Room for
coffee and cigarettes, which Eleanor Roosevelt had offered guests two
decades earlier. The men would retire to the Green Room for after,
dinner drinks and cigars, led by the president.
Over recent years, there have been all forms and manners of tobacco
use in the White House by presidents and their families. Gerald Ford,
the last U.S. president to use tobacco on a regular basis, is an
inveterate pipe smoker. Ike and FDR stuck to cigarettes as did both
their wives and several other twentieth-century first ladies including
Jacqueline Kennedy.
Among modern presidents, several have indulged in cigar smoking in the
White House. As a young man, John F. Kennedy had been a regular cigar
smoker with his father, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. As president,
Kennedy tended to smoke the thin, short petite Corona cigars. There is
also the legendary story of Kennedy's orders to Press Secretary Pierre
Salinger to go out and find as many of his favorite H. Upmann Petit
Coronas before the president signed the Cuban trade embargo (see
CIGAR AFICIONADO, Vol. 1, No. 1). Salinger found nearly 1,200 of the
cigars, bought them, and reported the purchase to Kennedy. The
U.S. leader promptly signed the embargo.
Richard Nixon, although not a regular smoker, enjoyed ritualistic
cigar puffing as a statesmanlike gesture with other leaders. The Nixon
administration in the early '70s was the last stand of the cigar at
the White House. Besides being the last president to smoke cigars,
Nixon's was the last presidency during which cigars were offered to
men after dinner in the Green Room.
Although the Clinton no-smoking policy has been much bally-hooed, the
policy has gradually evolved. Ronald Reagan did not smoke cigars,
however, his White House doctor, T. Burton Smith, persistently
attempted to get Reagan to ban smoking. The president resisted, not
wanting to be a host who offended those who chose to smoke. But by
1987, during his second administration, the practice of making tobacco
products, including cigarettes on the table, available to guests at
state dinners had stopped. A form of antismoking policy was in effect
during the Bush administration, according to the office of chief usher
at the White House. While ashtrays were apparent in the state rooms
and guests were not specifically told to extinguish their cigars or
cigarettes, smoking of any kind was not encouraged. Hillary Rodham
Clinton took the next step and removed the ashtrays, while
specifically prohibiting smoking in the White House.
Although most cigar-smoking presidents were from the South and
Midwest, there appears to be no predictable pattern. They run the
gamut, Democrats and Republicans, including the worst-rated
president--Harding--and one of those rated among the
greats--Jackson. With the decree earlier this year that transformed
the Bush measure to discourage smoking into a Clinton no-smoking
policy, it seems that the demise of the traditional White House cigar
has finally come. But if those telephoto-lens photographs of Bill
Clinton not smoking the cigar in his mouth are any indication,
this administration may inaugurate an entirely new form of cigar
pleasure--don't light it.
Carl Sferrzza Anthony writes frequently about the presidency. He is
the author of First Ladies: The Saga of Presidents' Wives and
Their Power, 1789-1990. |
