Memories of the Ford Administration

1

As quoted in the preface to Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida, by the translator from the French, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who supplied the refinement in brackets and presumably the translation from the German, which coincides in this sentence (but not everywhere) with that of Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback.

2

Think: if we were members of a two-dimensional world, creatures pencilled onto a universal paper, how would we conceive of the third dimension? By strained metaphoric conjurations, like these of mine above. If we were dogs, how would we imagine mathematics? Yet there would be a few inklings — the hazy awareness, for instance, that the two paws we usually see are not all the paws we have, and that two and two might make something like four. It is important, for modern man especially, as we reach the limits of physics and astronomy, to be aware that there truly may be phenomena beyond the borders of his ability to make mental pictures — to conceive of the inconceivable as a valid enough category.

3

Installed in Philadelphia’s New Theatre in 1816, their first commercial use in America. Their very first use had occurred ten years earlier, when David Melville, of Newport, Rhode Island, bravely utilized gas to light his home and the street directly in front. Across the water, London first publicly installed gas in 1807, and Paris adopted it for street lighting in 1818.

4

Even as I write, dear fellow New Hampshire historians, a young lady of our state, exactly Ann Coleman’s last age of twenty-three, one Pamela Smart, a high-school media counsellor, has been indicted and convicted of seducing (with the aid of a videotape of 9½ Weeks, described in Halliwell’s Film Guide as a “Crash course in hot sex for those who wish to major in such studies”) a fifteen-year-old student with the successful aim of getting him and his thuggish pals to murder her husband. She remained impassive during her trial, but in a subsequent hearing, as her late husband’s aggrieved father prolongedly hectored her from the witness stand, she jumped up and in her thrilling young voice exclaimed, “Your Honor, I can’t handle this.” We all saw it on television; one had to love her for it. Her utterance brings me as close as I am apt to get to the truth of Ann Coleman’s conjectured and disputed suicide: Your Honor, she couldn’t handle it.

5

The obituary says “Anne,” but the tombstone has it “Ann.” I have chosen the name writ in stone.

6

Major John Henry Eaton, Jackson’s Secretary of War, whose marriage, at Jackson’s advice, to Margaret O’Neale Timberlake, a tavern-keeper’s daughter of considerable romantic experience even before her marriage at the age of sixteen to a navy purser whom the infatuated then-Senator Eaton used his influence to keep at sea while he comforted the lonely bride, failed to quiet scandalized Washington tongues, especially those wagging on the distaff side of the Calhoun camp: Buchanan had approached Eaton with the Adams-appointment question before approaching Jackson, and was rather curtly advised by the major to inquire of the general himself. And so he did.

7

George Kremer, Congressman from Pennsylvania and Ingham satellite, whose letter to the Columbian Observer of Philadelphia the January after Buchanan’s interview with Jackson claimed that Clay had offered to vote for whoever would give him the State Department; Clay’s challenge to a duel was retracted after it was rumored that Kremer proposed to duel with squirrel rifles. Jackson’s reference here assumes that Kremer’s basis was a conversation with Buchanan describing the epochal interview of December 30th.

8

Moore, ed., Works, Vol. II, pp. 378–82.

9

Moore, ed., Works, Vol. II, pp. 348–63.

10

Moore, ed., Works, Vol. II, pp. 368–9.

11

Does it need explaining? A matter of opportunity and romance, let’s say — the romance of the child’s fever, the closed door at the end of the hall, the look of the side yard from what had been our window, motionless in the blue night like a frozen garden of ferns. A sentimental carryover from the faculty party, where we had momentarily seemed again a couple. Don’t ask, Retrospect. At some point history becomes like topography: there is no why to it, only a here and a there.

12

I was reminded, possibly, of washing our windows in Hayes with my mother as a child — the running-down ammonia-tinted suds, the squeak of the slowly soggy-becoming cloth, the growing ache in the forearm, the sunny bite in the air, which in northern Vermont can be cool even in August. A child sees no difference between clean and dirty windows, so the ritual was for me, like so much adult behavior, a purely magical act, an ordeal invented to bring me to my mother’s side and under her fond supervision. Through Genevieve’s ideally transparent panes the outdoors seemed to have crept closer, like a beast about to pounce.

13

Historians have generally treated this crushed cigar as a sign of great distress: e.g., Nichols has it that the Senators found the President greatly agitated. He stood by the hearth crushing a cigar in his shaking fingers and stammered that the move was against his policy. But Trescot, in the sentence that is the only source for the detail, takes the trouble to say that this untidy practice was a habit with Buchanan. His words are: The President was standing by the mantelpiece crushing up a cigar into pieces in his hand — a habit I have seen him practice often.

The punctuation and emphases for Buchanan’s utterance considerably vary. Trescot’s original, hastily jotted memoir gives it as “My God are calamities (or misfortunes, I forget which) never to come singly. I call God to witness — you gentlemen better than anybody know — that this is not only without but against my orders, it is against my policy.”

Nevins dresses it up considerably: “My God,” wailed [sic] Buchanan, who stood at the mantelpiece crushing a cigar in his hand, “are misfortunes never to come singly? I call God to witness, you, gentlemen, better than anybody, know that this is not only without, but against my orders. It is against my policy.”

14

According to Thurlow Weed’s account in the London Observer of February 9, 1862, Stanton’s protest was even more elaborate and allusive:

“That course, Mr. President, ought certainly to be regarded as most liberal towards erring brethren, but while one member of your Cabinet has fraudulent acceptances for millions of dollars afloat, and while the confidential clerk of another — himself in South Carolina teaching rebellion[21]

Then, in Weed’s spirited reconstruction, Black seconded the offer of resignation, followed by Holt and Dix, who did not join the Cabinet until the middle of the next month — which shows only that these rememberers get carried away, and history is built upon shifting sands.

15

And yet he seems miscast as villain. In the photograph of Buchanan with his Cabinet taken by W. H. Lowdermilk & Co. of Washington, D.C., sometime between the death of Aaron Brown and the resignation of Howell Cobb, Thompson is on the extreme left, blurred, looking stolid and, with his short haircut and clean shave, oddly modern. He was self-made, a poor boy from North Carolina who, Nichols says, in the young and growing state of Mississippi … amassed political power and a fortune. A frontiersman, if we remember that much of the Deep South was frontier, torn open by the rapid spread of cotton — a terrain for entrepreneurs and arrivistes. Romantically, he had fallen in love with a poor girl of fourteen, married her without consummating the marriage, and sent her off to Paris for four years of schooling; she was Kate Thompson, one of the social ornaments of Buchanan’s Washington, a special favorite of the old chief, and the author of lively letters that form an important illumination of the era and administration. When Thompson at last resigned (I go hence to make the destiny of Mississippi my destiny) Buchanan wrote a warm letter saying, No man could have more ably, honestly, & efficiently performed the various & complicated duties of the Interior Department than yourself.… I regret extremely that the troubles of the times have rendered it necessary for us to part. This billet-doux as late in the day as January 11, 1861!

16

One hazel, one blue, according to Nichols. He cites no ophthalmological source. It’s hard to believe, but magical to picture. The portrait by Jacob Eichholtz, done when Buchanan was about to go off to Russia, is chromatically inconclusive. The one by George P. A. Healy, in the National Portrait Gallery, shows his eyes as both blue, with a slight cast (strabismus) in the left. Opposite this portrait in The American Heritage Pictorial History of the Presidents the unsigned text parenthetically claims one eye [was] nearsighted, the other farsighted. See Kierkegaard, Journals, December 10, 1837.

17

Not, in fairness, that I was entirely oblivious to popular music. It was the Ford era that saw the rise of Pachelbel’s Canon in D on the charts; I know because the tune, with its low, slow, trickling theme of infinite forestallment, became something like our, my and Genevieve’s, romantic anthem, along with The Divine Miss M, a cassette I gave her on our affair’s first Christmas, for its terrific one-two punch of “Do You Want to Dance?” followed by Midler’s ding-dong belting-out of “Chapel of Love.” Going to get ma-a-arried …

18

James Buchanan, who served from 1857–1861, is said to have had the neatest handwriting of any President. This encomium from Facts and Fun About the Presidents, by George Sullivan, illustrated by George Roper (New York: Scholastic, Inc., 1987). The same valuable source informs us that Three American Presidents were left-handed: James Garfield, Harry Truman, and Gerald Ford. Since 1987, the voters have added a fourth.

19

Derived, of course, from that callous passage in Emerson’s essay “Experience” which states, I have learned that I cannot dispose of other people’s facts.… A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.

20

In a letter of October 21, 1865, he replied to a correspondent, a Mr. Faulkner, who had supposed that the former President might admit, in retrospect, some mistakes, I must say that you are mistaken. I pursued a settled, consistent line of policy from the beginning to the end; & on reviewing my past conduct, I do not recollect a single measure which I should desire to recall, even if this were in my power. Under this conviction I have enjoyed a tranquil & cheerful mind, notwithstanding the abuse I have received.

21

An allusion to Bailey (see this page) and Thompson, who was right there, as we can see, and who in any case went to North Carolina, the previous week, leaving on December 17th and back in Washington by the 22nd, when the Indian-bonds scandal[22] broke. — has just stolen $900,000 from the Indian Trust Fund, the experiment of ordering Major Anderson back to Fort Moultrie would be dangerous. But if you intend to try it, before it is done I beg that you will accept my resignation.”

22

See this page — this page and this page — this page.