Confronting the Presidents: No Spin Assessments from Washington to Biden

by Bill O'Reilly

American history is fading somewhat in the nation’s classrooms. This is dangerous because failing to understand your country can stimulate poor decision-making and personal failure. All of us should seek the truth. It is our mandate as a free people to do that.

Yet the greatest headache George Washington endures is the handpicked group of men he has chosen to advise him. This bickering “cabinet” of four politicians includes Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney General Edmund Randolph. Jefferson and Hamilton, in particular, loathe each other. At issue is whether the federal government should be a strong central power, as Hamilton believes, or if the states should wield the most strength, as in Jefferson’s point of view. This debate will continue for generations to come.

After eight years as vice president, a job he calls “the most insignificant that ever the imagination of man contrived,” John Adams will be elected to replace him.

So, despite the divisions, the growing power of the press, and increasing animosity with both England and France, George Washington gracefully steps down, leaving America stronger than when he took office. His successor will be hard-pressed to make the same claim.

Adams believes slavery is antithetical to America’s promise of freedom.

Adams certainly enjoys his coffee, but that will have to wait until after his morning libation. Lifting the glass to his lips with relish, he downs a gill of two-year-old hard apple cider. He does this every morning before breakfast, believing its health benefits include preventing scurvy.

Adams becomes a powerful politician in the Federalist movement.

John Adams arises each morning at 5:00 a.m. He enjoys a five-mile walk, firmly believing that “move or die is the language of our maker in the constitution of our bodies.”

Breakfast is at 8:00 a.m. For the first three years of his presidency, John Adams occupies the same Philadelphia mansion where George Washington once lived. It is not until there are just five months left in his first term that he will move into the wilderness of the District of Columbia.

President Adams works throughout the day, pausing for dinner with Abigail at 3:00 p.m.

President Adams has two dogs—Juno and Satan. He also has a horse named Cleopatra. This makes him the first president to have pets while in office.

Adams moves into the president’s mansion when the Marquis de Lafayette gifts him with an alligator, which is kept in a bathroom in the East Wing.

Abigail is unafraid to share her opinions, warning President Adams about members of both political parties who might be a threat. Among those she despises most is Alexander Hamilton. “The very devil,” Abigail calls him. “Lasciviousness itself.”

Adams serves only one term in office. He will develop the American navy into a juggernaut, soon to be the equal of any in the world.

Hamilton demands the president recall an envoy about to sail for France. Adams refuses—and fate is on his side. The Convention of 1800 soon follows, ending hostilities with France. The moment is an enormous victory for John Adams. He has brokered peace, regained the upper hand within his fractured party, and silenced Alexander Hamilton’s war drumbeat.

“The American government might totter, if not fall, under [Adams’s] auspices,” Hamilton writes. Yet John Adams fights on. His popularity is such that he carries every Federalist ballot in the 1800 nomination process. Hamilton is then discredited for trying to destroy the party with his libelous statements.

Newspapers say Adams demands to be called “His Highness.” Others write that Thomas Jefferson is an enemy of the Constitution. It is one of the nastiest presidential campaigns in the history of the United States.

Before dawn, John Adams enters a carriage, beginning the arduous journey to Massachusetts, where he will live out his days with Abigail. They will be married for fifty-four years. Among Adams’s greatest friendships in later life will be the man he currently loathes more than any other. The man who succeeds him as president of the United States. Thomas Jefferson.

Today is the first presidential inauguration in Washington, DC. Jefferson rises with the sun, as per his normal routine. He likes to brag that he hasn’t arisen later than dawn in fifty years. That habit does not change at his Washington boardinghouse this morning. He rises, soaks his feet in ice water (another longtime daily habit), shaves, and then breakfasts at 8:00 a.m. with the other guests here at the Conrad and McMunn establishment at the corner of New Jersey Avenue and C Street. Meals are taken at a single communal table.

The oath of office is delivered by Supreme Court chief justice John Marshall. The two men are distant cousins but equally far apart politically, agreeing on nothing at all. They will soon become bitter enemies.

Like many of the group labeled the “Founding Fathers,” Thomas Jefferson has very specific political views and is intolerant of opposition. Thus, he develops feuds with influential figures like Patrick Henry, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton. In time, those disagreements go well beyond civil behavior. Governor Henry, in particular, used to be a friend who became an avowed enemy because Henry wanted America defined as supporting an established church while also supporting religious freedom.

But in later years, his animosity is so great that Jefferson will write to James Madison that “we must pray for [Henry’s] death.”

At the start of Jefferson’s second term, he is sixty-one years old. He is no longer the young idealist directing the course of freedom and is now descending into eccentric behavior. Once a man fond of the finest clothing, he now wears slippers and a robe to work. His clothing is a mixture of styles dating back decades, a lack of decorum that infuriates one British diplomat. He makes his office in the State Dining Room, using the adjacent Red Room for entertaining. The president keeps a pet mockingbird in a cage, often letting it fly around the office as he conducts business.

It is Jefferson and the young James Madison who form the new Democratic-Republican Party in the 1790s. The movement advocates less federal power over individuals and the states. Madison advocates for a system of checks and balances among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government to ensure that no group acquires more power than any other.

James Madison is easily elected president in 1808. He is fifty-seven years old when taking office, the same age George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were. In contrast to those men, James Madison looks tired and worn. One audience member in the Senate Chamber watching the inauguration calls the new president “a withered little apple-John.”

The president rises with the dawn and is dressed by his fifteen-year-old slave and valet, Paul Jennings. Madison has a simple breakfast with tea at 7:00 a.m. and then begins his workday in his upstairs office. He smokes cigars, a habit he will continue until his death. As the day winds down, Madison prefers to be in bed no later than 10:00 p.m.

James Monroe becomes one of the most dominant presidential candidates in history, winning the election of 1816 with 68 percent of the vote and a landslide Electoral College victory. The new president is fifty-eight years old when he takes office. He is six feet tall, slender, with a full head of gray hair.

Monroe is sworn in on a raised platform in front of the Old Brick Capitol because the original was burned by the British. Eight thousand citizens are in attendance, making his inauguration the largest so far in history.

He will not move into the newly renovated White House for six months but has already begun a radical new interior: chairs, plates, and glassware from France—a sharp contrast from the British look favored by Dolley Madison. A fifty-three-setting service of porcelain china is being commissioned bearing Monroe’s initials, beginning a new presidential tradition.

President Monroe believes it is time to see the expanding nation for himself. The summer of 1817 is spent on a fifteen-week grand tour of New England and the Midwest. Monroe’s goal is to unify the nation—a task in which he proves quite successful.

The Federalist Party will be gone by the time James Monroe leaves office, but his own Democratic-Republican Party will be opposed by a new group known as the Whigs in 1824.

Monroe rises each day at dawn. He is a known Francophile due to his years serving as minister to France but prefers Virginia cuisine for breakfast in the form of egg bread (also known as French toast), flaky lard biscuits, and a breakfast roll known as Williamsburg buns.

Then comes the Panic of 1819. A decline in imports, exports, and agricultural productivity leads to the first American depression since the 1780s. Foreclosures and high unemployment have many questioning Monroe’s financial policies. Large money institutions are declaring bankruptcy. The president responds by easing mortgage payments on lands purchased from the federal government.

As America expands westward, the matter of whether or not to allow enslaved human beings in new states becomes a heated issue. Missouri is denied admission to the Union in 1819 due to its pro-slavery stance. The Missouri Compromise is then brokered by Monroe. In exchange for allowing Missouri statehood, the northern anti-slavery territory of Maine is also made a state. This maintains a legislative balance between South and North. Monroe only signs the bill into law when he is satisfied it is constitutional.

despite the Panic of 1819 and the slavery controversy, James Monroe’s popularity never slips. In 1820, he is reelected. He runs unopposed, the last time that will happen in American history.

Standing before the Eighteenth Congress, the president starkly warns Europe not to meddle in North America. There will be no more colonization of American lands. Any attempt to do so will be considered an act of war. In exchange, the United States will not intervene in European affairs. The threat of war will become known as the Monroe Doctrine, and for the next 150 years, it will guide American foreign policy.4

James Monroe, now a widower, is forced to sell Oak Hill to pay his debts and eventually moves to New York City to live with his oldest daughter. There, Monroe becomes extremely ill, dying less than a year after his wife. He is seventy-three. As with his friend Thomas Jefferson and his political opponent John Adams, the date of President James Monroe’s death is July 4.

“I rise usually between four and five—walk two miles, bathe in the Potomac River, and walk home, which occupies two hours,” he writes, then describes a morning spent having breakfast, reading, and writing, only stepping into the office shortly after noon. But as the president ages, his personal physician cautions him to take it easy on the skinny-dipping. He loves being in the Potomac perhaps too much.

John Quincy Adams is lucky to be president. He actually lost the popular vote to Andrew Jackson by a wide margin. However, Jackson did not reach the 50 percent threshold in the Electoral College vote, and there were three other men in contention, including Adams. In a series of backdoor moves, Adams was able to convince Henry Clay to give him his votes.

However, after Adams secured Clay’s support, he named him secretary of state. That action is widely known as the “corrupt bargain.”

His toughness will earn him the nickname “Old Hickory.” Making up rules, Jackson revels in his military duties, executing treaties with Indian nations he has no power to authorize.2 It is, however, Jackson’s January 8, 1815, victory at the Battle of New Orleans that makes him a national hero. Communications are so slow he does not know the war is already over.

President Andrew Jackson is elected as a man of the people. Yet he has the food and wine tastes of an aristocrat. The president rises at dawn and enjoys a breakfast of coffee, chicken hash, hot waffles, and blackberry jam. But it is the evening meal that shows the dichotomy in Jackson’s food preferences. His favorite dish is something called “leather britches”—green beans cooked in bacon fat. He also enjoys fried ham, gravy, apple pie, and a country dish known as Old Hickory soup, made from nuts, hot water, and sugar.

The White House chef hired by Andrew Jackson is French. The president soon earns the nickname “King Andrew” by critics who mock him for gourmet cuisine served on fine china with expensive silver.

“Daniel Webster’s punch,” named for the American politician and Jackson supporter, loosens tongues with its potent mixture of brandy, champagne, claret, sugar, green tea, banana, pineapple, and strawberry. Oysters are a personal favorite.

At twenty-one, Emily is young for the role and not educated in the art of formal entertaining. Yet, as the daughter of Rachel’s brother, Emily has a long fondness for the president and tends to him in moments of mourning. And while she gives birth to three children during the Jackson administration, she will add to the president’s grief in 1836, dying of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight.

President Jackson brings fourteen slaves to the White House from Hermitage—eight male and six female.

Andrew Jackson makes the White House a home. Toilet usage still requires a walk to an outdoor privy in all sorts of weather, but running water is installed in the mansion for the first time, allowing Jackson to enjoy daily bathing in a combination “shower-bath.”

The squawk of Jackson’s pet African gray parrot echoes through the corridors. Originally a gift to Rachel, he brought it with him from Tennessee. Poll, as the bird is named, has learned more than a few swear words from Jackson and is prone to letting loose, much to the surprise of White House visitors.

From the date of his first inauguration to the time he leaves office, “King Andrew” will know one crisis after another.

Tribes in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida are stripped of lands they have owned for generations and are forcibly relocated west of the Mississippi. By the end of his two terms, Jackson will remove almost all tribes east of that river—seventy thousand individuals. The brutal relocation will become known as the Trail of Tears due to the thousands of men, women, and children who die from disease, unsanitary conditions, and exposure to the elements while making the long march to the Oklahoma Territory.