Now it’s Clinton’s turn. As ever our national ambivalence on the subject of presidential vacations turns on four questions: what they wear, where they go, how much it’s going to cost and what they actually do when they get there. Considering the intensity of our conflicting emotions on these matters, Richard Nixon was probably our best president. He regularly went on vacation, as per our national instruction, but never looked like he was having a good time. This was ideal. And, crucially, Nixon never took his business clothes off, either. He was always dressed for nuclear retaliation. “My fellow Americans, it is with a heavy heart that I come before you tonight…” You can’t go down that particular road wearing flowered trunks, a cap promoting the locally brewed beer and a T shirt with a picture of Mauna Kea on it.
Face it: this country doesn’t run to Ralph Lauren presidents. From Harry Truman’s riotous shirts to Nixon’s poolside oxfords to Carter’s underwearish running clothes to Clinton’s eye-averter shorts there has been complaint about this, but as always, ambivalent, contradictory complaint. We don’t approve of their being ordinary and Uncle Ed–like in their ghastly attire and habits. We live in dread from the moment Air Force One takes off for whatever garden spot the Chief Executive has chosen that our next view of him will be in a knit swimsuit and brand-new white sneakers with short black socks. But just let them show a little class or taste for the more expensive things and look out! For although they may look like Uncle Ed, lying there sunburned and paunchy in the sand, they also necessarily travel in approximations of royal progressions from one borrowed and/or commandeered palace to another, our very own Plantagenets and Hohenzollerns. Thus, the incoherent core question we ask over and over again concerning presidential vacations: Why do these fellows look so tacky and undistinguished and who the hell do they think they are, anyway, the Queen of England?
The temporarily appropriated palaces deserve a special word. They are not always the only recourse of presidents without vacation havens of their own. For even those blessed with private country getaways pretty regularly end up encamped at some wellwisher or other’s beachfront spread in Florida or some fancy Palm Springs hilltop manse, attended by their flowerbed-destroying, serenity-shattering armies of Secret Service agents, functionaries and press. Presidents, and especially their security contingents, are known to be killer guests, fine if you treasure the prestige that goes with their visit and don’t mind the continuous presence of large groups of expressionless men standing on top of your dahlias.
In fact, the appropriated palatial site is an ancient prerogative of the traveling pooh-bah and so, of course, is the consequent wreckage. We have written testimony to this over the centuries at least from the Crusades, but none more poignant than Robert Massie’s account of what Peter the Great and his traveling party did in England to the elegant house and grounds that the essayist John Evelyn had spent 45 years perfecting: multitudinous ink and grease stains, battered paintwork, pried-open locks, missing tiles, ripped featherbeds (“torn as if by wild animals”), 50 chairs apparently used for firewood and 20 paintings apparently used for-yes-target practice.
Our own most notoriously destructive presidential parties have never attained this level of achievement, but even if they had, no one would probably feel sorry for their affluent hosts. For the lenders of these great country places, unjust as it may be, tend to be regarded by the press and public as people seeking special favors, more to be censured than pitied, guilty of some unspecified but unsavory transaction. The concept of unfelonious, if somewhat showy, hospitality is never admitted into these discussions at all, legitimate though it may be. This illustrates yet another of our confusions, the one about cost: American taxpayers, who grouse all the time about the high cost of presidential travel and trappings, do not want to pay for any of it themselves, but interestingly do not want anyone else-especially a moneybags–to pay for it either, fearing corruption of some kind.
There is, finally, what these poor souls do on their vacations. When they say it is a working vacation, we in the press go to great lengths to prove it is not and insinuate that because of the deteriorating situation in Lower Graustark they should be back in the Oval Office. When they say they are relaxing we make jokes about how much they are working and how they are such weirdos they don’t know how to relax. We don’t like graceless, common activities, but are suspicious of patrician ones. And it all comes back to what we regard as the proper image for a vacationing president. I could have told George Bush that the sporty cap and the golf cart had to go. There is no way to look dignified while driving a golf cart, I don’t care if you’re Marcus Aurelius. The whole issue of Bush’s being on holiday at the wrong time could actually have been avoided if he had gone in for windswept, contemplative beach walks, merely looking preoccupied for the camera.
That’s what we want–a vacationing presidential family that is at once ordinary and special, frugal and regal, there and not there, on the job and on the beach. As Ross Perot would say, it’s that simple.
