American presidents often drawn to hunting
Knight Ridder Newspapers
PHILADELPHIA - (KRT) - The man now in the Oval Office hunts. Next year's occupant almost certainly will. There's a better-than-even chance that his successor will stalk game with a gun - probably quail or duck, maybe deer.
Chances are, you don't. Fewer than 6 percent of Americans are hunters. But we love to put them in the White House. Eisenhower, Johnson, Carter, Bushes father and son - half the presidents of the last 50 years have been avid hunters (photo-op sportsmen factored out).
At an hour when a good many Americans were still in bed, George W. Bush celebrated New Year's with a father-son quail hunt in Texas; W. killed about five.
Presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry hunts every chance he can get. He can talk in detail about duck, deer, dove - shooting and gutting them, roasting and eating them.
It's more than the macho thing. All over the world, masculinity is a prerequisite for power, but few hunters are in residence in presidential palaces from Italy to France to Japan. Like cowboys, hunters are quintessentially American.
From the earliest days of the American colonies, democracy and hunting were intertwined. Many settlers despised the British system, where all game was owned by the crown or private estates and only wealthy landowners could hunt. As early as 1623, Plymouth Colony decreed that fowling, fishing and hunting were "free" to all.
In 1842, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the landmark New Jersey case of Martin v. Waddell, in which one side had claimed exclusive ownership of oysters from beds adjacent to his land along the Raritan River; the court ruled that "dominion and property" in the nation's lands and waters belonged to the people.
The ruling fit the country. America was a vast frontier, teeming with wildlife on uncharted lands. Generation after generation set out to tame the wild territory, facing tremendous hardship for the limitless opportunities that beckoned.
Our heroes were hunters, pioneers and Indian fighters. Daniel Boone. Davy Crockett. Teddy Roosevelt, by far the biggest hunter ever to occupy the White House, was also a prolific writer who envisioned successions of great hunters and political leaders taking the nation to world power. Americans were unique among "civilized" nations, shaped by rugged individualism and the violence and possibility of the frontier.
More than a century after the census declared the American frontier closed, the ethos lives on through popular culture - movie westerns, television, political imagery. Presidents chop wood on the ranch and talk of projecting American power to the other side of world. It helps if they can knock down a few birds.
Few other nations were formed through the violent subjugation of the frontier, and few other nations view hunters - or guns - as we do.
In Germany, for example, hunters are respected as stewards of the community's land. They are responsible for wildlife management in the way that fish and game officers are here. The most highly trained among them - more than two years of study and apprenticeship on top of the six to nine months of classes followed by written, oral, practical and shooting proficiency tests required for a hunting license - are honored as jagermeister.
Only a jagermeister, or "master hunter," has the stature to lease a community's aggregated lands, bringing in other hunters to help care for the private resource in exchange for the right to hunt. Presenting oneself as a swaggering big-game hunter would be a good way to lose the privilege entirely.
In America, it's a good way to win the White House.
More is at play here than our fascination with frontier culture. We also like big-T personalities.
Big-T's, a.k.a. T-Types, are at one end of a continuum of human behavior on which psychologists assess the importance of risk or excitement as a motivating factor. The "T" stands for "thrills" (as opposed to aggression, which is Type-A). Big-T's are risk-takers; little-t's are risk-averse. Big-T's are action-oriented, push-the-envelope types, either mentally (Albert Einstein) or physically (Evel Knievel). They like intensity, independence and conflict; they dislike structure and control.
Virtually all American presidents are on the big-T end of the scale. So are many hunters (and, for that matter, animal-rights activists). The writers of the Declaration of Independence were big-T's, as were the pioneers and many among the waves of immigrants who left behind everything they knew in a bold move for a better life.
These are the observations of Frank Farley, a Temple University psychologist who named the personality type 20 years ago and believes it is responsible for America's domination of science, technology and popular culture, not to mention world power.
"We are a big-T nation," he said.
A key attribute of a big-T is the ability to stand firm, even to thrive, amid uncertainty. Imagine a hunter faced with a charging grizzly - or a president responding to a terrorist attack.
In times of national crisis, voters have a gut-level attraction to the biggest of the big-T's. They are our frontier heroes, able to shoot the bear between the eyes and destroy the savage enemy we don't understand.
This year's presidential election takes place during one of the most uncertain periods in modern American history. So it is no surprise that we have narrowed the battle to two men - George W. Bush and John Kerry - who love to hunt and are adept at presenting themselves as heroic warriors.
It is the first time in 40 years that two hunters fought it out for the presidency, and only a victory by vegetarian Ralph Nader - particularly unlikely in a time of war - would prevent the inauguration of a hunter president in January.
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FROM EISENHOWER TO BUSH: SPORTSMEN IN THE WHITE HOUSE
President Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09) is the undisputed leader of sportsmen in the White House, and he had lots of followers: Half the presidents in the past 50 years were avid hunters. Those same leaders loved to fish.
Dwight D. Eisenhower (1953-61)
Ike began hunting in his youth, managed to arrange a partridge hunt in North Africa during World War II, and shot quail in Georgia nearly every February during his eight-year presidency. He loved fishing even more, for trout, muski and northern pike. Constituents sent lures, hooks, even fish. White House gift files contain some 200 entries for flies.
John F. Kennedy (1961-63)
An experienced sailor, JFK is known to have fished one time, when he caught a sailfish - off Acapulco on his honeymoon. He hunted once as well. As historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. recalled it, Lyndon B. Johnson "liked to impose tests of manhood, of which the most notorious was bringing politicians to his ranch and insisting that they kill deer. John Kennedy, filled with deep distaste, had killed his deer after the 1960 election."
Lyndon B. Johnson (1963-69)
A 1964 article headlined "LBJ - Outdoor Sportsman" recalled Johnson flying on Air Force One to Texas during a storm, his brows furrowed until he returned from the cockpit relieved that the pilot would "have us on the ranch in time to see the deer before dark." Johnson was known to go after only the biggest racks; dove hunting was his favorite blood sport. His lakes were stocked, and Johnson spent hours catching grasshoppers for his daughters to fish with.
Richard M. Nixon (1969-74)
Nixon was so ill-at-ease in nature that he walked on the beach in a suit and dress shoes. He was never known to hunt (although he did occasionally fish in the Bahamas with Robert Abplanalp and Bebe Rebozo). A search of the National Archives turns up a number of hits, such as this tape-recorded meeting with counsel John Dean on March 21, 1973, the height of the Watergate scandal (Dean has suggested he might go to jail to spare Nixon):
President: Sometimes it's well to give them ...
Dean: (Sighs)
President: something, and then they don't want the bigger fish then.
Gerald R. Ford (1974-77)
Although Ford's father and two brothers were big on hunting and fishing, the president's alpha male was expressed mainly through football and basketball. A complimentary Pennsylvania fishing license is in his White House files. Contacted recently, he had no memories of either.
Jimmy Carter (1977-81)
"I had a fishing pole in my hands as early as I can remember, and would go hunting with Daddy long before I could have anything to shoot other than a BB gun," Carter wrote in his memoir of growing up in the South. He hunted everything from possum to deer to duck, and has fished around the world. He helicoptered from the White House to Spruce Creek, Pa., where he still flyfishes every year.
Ronald Reagan (1981-89)
Known more for riding horses and chopping wood, both in Hollywood and as president at his Santa Barbara ranch, Reagan did recall fishing the Rock River as a boy. But biographer Lou Cannon wrote that he "was so caring of the wildlife at Rancho del Cielo that he had rattlesnakes near the ranch trapped and carted away, instead of following the usual ranching practice of simply killing them."
George H.W. Bush (1989-93)
Bush learned to hunt as a boy visiting his grandparents' lodge in South Carolina. His first love is the fishing of his Maine childhood. Equally at home on the ocean or by a stream, casting from a boat or on shore, he missed the 1992 Democratic convention and Ross Perot's ending of his third-party bid while by a creek. "The joy of fishing with your son in a river in Wyoming, I'll tell you, it's hard to compete with anything," he said upon returning to civilization.
Bill Clinton (1993-01)
In Clinton's rural Arkansas, deals are sealed over a duck hunt. He did go, both as governor and president, but friends said his heart wasn't in it. "He loves people, loves doing what people are doing," recalled a longtime friend and hunting buddy in Little Rock. "The actual going out there and seeing how many ducks you can kill is not part of his nature. The camaraderie part is." Clinton is not much into fishing, either.
George W. Bush (2001-)
The proprietors of the lodge where Carter flyfishes in Pennsylvania's Huntingdon County said No. 43 was rumored to be interested but a visit never materialized. Bush loves the bass fishing of his native Texas, and likes to spend New Year's Day hunting quail with his father (and high-powered family friend James A. Baker 3d) in south Texas. "I think I shot five," he told reporters on Jan. 1, 2004.
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(SOURCES: National Archives and Records Administration's presidential libraries; Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; Argosy magazine, October 1964; Life magazine, March 1971; An Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood and An Outdoor Journal: Adventures and Reflections, both by Jimmy Carter; President Reagan: Role of a Lifetime by Lou Cannon and Ronald Reagan: An American Life by Ronald Reagan; George Bush: The Life of a Lone Star Yankee by Herbert S. Parmet.)
