3 Mar 2019

Executive time: Presidential slackers in history

From Sunday Morning, 10:36 am on 3 March 2019

President Donald Trump has been criticised for spending inordinate amounts of time watching television and eating burgers, but he’s far from the first President to get slack for slacking off.

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Photo: AFP

Teddy Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan are also in the ranks of presidents partial to a bit of “executive time, professor of history at Iowa State University, Stacy Cordery says.

Dr Cordery is the author of ‘A Brief History of Presidential Lethargy’ and joined Jim Mora to discuss the less energetic presidents.

She says presidents are more scrutinised today than ever before. Part of that is the rise of 24-hour news coverage, particularly when CNN moved to full coverage in 1980, and social media has compounded that scrutiny.

But the roots of public expectation of work ethic goes back further. She says Theodore Roosevelt changed the game in terms of the Presidency.

“Before Theodore Roosevelt became President in 1901, the real power in Washington lay with Congress. Congress made laws, and the president signed them. He was supposed to be the captain of the ship of state and stay out of Congressional debates and remain above the Congressional horse-trading – that was considered beneath Presidential dignity.

“Through a combination of charisma, intellect, relentless drive, and an overpowering sense of duty, Roosevelt participated in the governing of the nation to an unprecedented degree. Roosevelt really changed our expectations of how a president should act in office and because of him we now expect the president to identify problems that plague the nation, to provide possible solutions, to work closely with Congress solve those problems and indeed use what he called the ‘bully pulpit’ to educate and convince Americans of the importance of these actions. That’s a lot of political involvement where before there had been almost none.”

Creating such expectations of a president didn’t work out well for his successor William Howard Taft who could fall asleep on a dime – sometimes standing up - weighed 300 pounds and was a self-admitted procrastinator. Cordery says this caused Americans to view Taft as “plain lazy.”

Stacy Cordery

Stacy Cordery Photo: Andrea Dahlberg Photography

Calvin Coolidge, president in the 1920s, also suffered from sleepiness. When he died, American humourist Dorothy Parker said, “how could they tell?”

“Coolidge napped unashamedly an hour a day after lunch and, when he missed his nap, he fell asleep like clockwork in afternoon meetings, so they just let him nap.”

Ronald Reagan admitted to nodding off in Cabinet meetings and do so very publicly in a meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome in 1982.

“Reagan was sensitive to this because he was America’s oldest president,” she says.

Bill Clinton on the other hand was criticised for working too hard.

“Too many late nights, too many demands on his staff, too many all-nighters. This is chiefly because Clinton believed that to be a good leader he needed four hours a day to read and to think and to reflect and to analyse. Some days, if he was lucky, he got two – most days he got none. You can see from his schedule, which is digitised at the Clinton Presidential Library, even these rare periods of reflection could be interrupted by official phone calls.”

Cordery says it can be lonely at the top and the demands on the president are extraordinary.

“These days, with 24/7 news coverage, presidents need to look – at least – like they’re working hard.”

Trump, for his part, denies any laziness despite his liberal schedule and frequent rounds of golf. He said in one of his tweets that his work schedule should have been reported positively not negatively, that executive time was when he was working, and that he probably works more hours than any past president.

Cordery says that's unlikely, at least in the modern era.