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The Presidents and the Pastime
The Presidents and the Pastimedraws on Curt Smith's extensive background as a former White House presidential speechwriter to chronicle the historic relationship between baseball, the \"most American\" sport, and the U.S. presidency.Smith, whoUSA TODAYcalls \"America's voice of authority on baseball broadcasting,\" starts before America's birth, when would‑be presidents played baseball antecedents. He charts how baseball cemented its reputation as America's pastime in the nineteenth century, such presidents as Lincoln and Johnson playing town ball or giving employees time off to watch. Smith tracks every U.S. president from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump, each chapter filled with anecdotes: Wilson buoyed by baseball after suffering disability; a heroic FDR saving baseball in World War II; Carter, taught the game by his mother, Lillian; Reagan, airing baseball on radio that he never saw-by \"re-creation.\"George H. W. Bush, for whom Smith wrote, explains, \"Baseball has everything.\" Smith, having interviewed a majority of presidents since Richard Nixon, shares personal stories on each. Throughout,The Presidents and the Pastimeprovides a riveting narrative of how America's leaders have treated baseball. From Taft as the first president to throw the \"first pitch\" on Opening Day in 1910 to Obama's \"Go Sox!\" scrawled in the guest register at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2014, our presidents have deemed it the quintessentially American sport, enriching both their office and the nation.
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Nixon’s the One
In early 1967 I wrote the Manhattan law firm of Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie, Alexander, and Mitchell to say that I would be in the City that August with a high school group. Was there a chance I could meet its senior partner—a Baby Boomer’s cynosure of the post-war age? Secretary Rose Woods replied that Richard Milhous Nixon would be abroad, writing forReader’s Digest. However, schedules change, and would I phone upon arrival? I did, invited to Nixon’s office at 20 Broad Street, off Wall. For half an hour we spoke of sports and college—my dad’s alma
Book Chapter
Power of Two
It would be hard to find a president less like William Howard Taft than Thomas Woodrow Wilson. America’s 1909–13 chief executive was conservative, obese, and droll—at three hundred pounds, our heaviest president. Taft’s 1913–21 successor was ascetic, rail thin, and a don of the Progressive movement. Taft found rhetoric something to take or leave. Wilson found it synonymous with policy, renewing thespokenState of the Union address last used in 1801. Taft’s presidency accented domestic affairs. Wilson looked abroad. He knew, like British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey, that the world was getting smaller, auguring World
Book Chapter
The Gipper
Some term language crucial to Ronald Reagan’s presidency. They understate the truth. Language was his presidency, the spoken word its core. In the 2004 bookRonald Reagan, Dinesh D’Souza noted how many miss America’s fortieth president. “He isn’t returning,” the author cautioned prior to the Gipper’s death that year. “The truth is, we don’t need another Reagan”—rather, to ask what he would say.
Even his first major job foretold the weight of language to Reagan’s presidency. Franklin Roosevelt used 1930s radio to combat fear. Reagan used it to carry the Chicago Cubs over WHO Des Moines. Hugh Sidey would
Book Chapter
Triple Play
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, inaugurated a first time in 1933, is commonly thought of as America’s first radio president. To referencePorgy and Bess, “It ain’t necessarily so.” The wireless became commercially available on November 2, 1920, election night, over Westinghouse-owned then one-hundred-watt KDKA in Pittsburgh, the nation’s first radio station. Republican presidential nominee Warren Gamaliel Harding won a landslide over Democrat and Ohio governor James M. Cox, the loser’s running mate being—FDR! For the next quarter century each major party, including 1921–33’s presidential triple play of Harding to Calvin Coolidge to Herbert Hoover, made radio the primary medium.
Book Chapter
Larger Than Life
In January 1965 the former home of the Washington Senators, then “a mass of tangled weeds and spectre-like stands,” according to theWashington Post, yielded to a wrecking ball that savaged steel and cement but spared sweet memory. The prior fall local NBC-TV affiliate WRC had aired a documentary,The Last Out, about 1911–61 Griffith Stadium, now replaced by a Howard University hospital—“pretty apt,” observed 1962–68 expansion Senators PA announcer Phil Hochberg, “when you think of how many broken hearts the ball club left behind.” (To restate, the names “Senators” and “Nationals” are used interchangeably, as they
Book Chapter
From Softball to Hardball
Gerald Ford dreamt of being Speaker of the House of Representatives, but as with many dreams life intervened. He had retired by the time his Republican Party finally got a House majority in 1994. Meanwhile, President Nixon’s choice of Ford as vice president in 1973, then his next-year farewell, left the Michigander with a consolation prize—the presidency. By comparison, the dream of his successor, James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr., was realized in an American schoolbook way: “the small-town man [a peanut farmer from the tiny burg of Plains, Georgia] who dreams of becoming president, and who by hard work
Book Chapter
The Baseball Lifer
From 1989 to 1993 in the White House, then later when both of us had left, I was privileged to be a speechwriter for George Herbert Walker Bush, whose favorite sport was baseball, the president having played, coached, watched, and learned its endless permutations.
Born June 12, 1924, in Milton, Massachusetts, Bush grew up in Connecticut, spending each summer in Kennebunkport, Maine, at the family home at Walker’s Point. As a child, he learned modesty and propriety from his mother, a slight woman and steel force. “Now, George,” Dorothy Bush would say, referencing the Protestant hymn, “none of this ‘How
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