How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country
Read How to Fight Presidents: Defending Yourself Against the Badasses Who Ran This Country Online
Authors: Daniel O'Brien
Copyright © 2014 by Daniel O’Brien
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-385-34757-0
eBook ISBN 978-0-385-34758-7
Illustrations by Winston Rowntree
Cover design by Michael Nagin
Cover photography by Michael S. Heath
v3.1
This book is dedicated to my father,
who is more badass than any of the presidents in this book,
and my mother, who is smarter and sweeter.
For Tommy and David.
And for Elise.
“It took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to get where we are today, but we have just begun.”
–BARACK OBAMA (a president)
“I look out at all of the fresh young faces in this classroom and I can think of one thing to say: not one of you is ever going to grow up to be the president of the United States.”
That was the very first thing my American Government professor said on the very first day of class in my freshman year at Rowan University. He didn’t say it to get a laugh, and in fact glared at anyone who so much as smirked. I know, because
I
smirked, and I was wearing pajama pants at the time, and that was another thing he hated (I maintained that I was honoring the spirit of the class by declaring very comfortable independence from my constricting oppressors [buttons and zippers], but he refused to be swayed). He went on to say that he had worked long enough at this university that he was technically un-fireable, and since absolutely nothing could touch his job security, being well-liked was not important to him. His stated
goal was not to teach us about American Government (“a fool’s errand,” he called it), nor was it to prepare us for a life
in
government (“Get over yourself”). His only ambition was to spend the next semester getting us “mentally equipped enough to properly read the newspaper, but honestly I don’t even think most of you could handle that. Especially not you, in the pajama pants, in public, during the day, god
dammit
come on, are those women’s pants? You are a boy.”
Out of every crotchety insult he delivered in his opening lecture (and every crotchety insult he would aim at me throughout the semester, including use of the persistent nickname “PJ Pete,” a frankly unfair label for someone who wore pajamas
one time
and was, in fact, named Daniel), the only thing that really stuck with me was his first accusation: that I would never be president.
I never wanted to be president, but when that constantly angry professor told me I couldn’t—
even if I wanted to
—something inside of me was triggered and I thought, “Oh yeah? I’ll show you. I’m going to be president. I’m going to be president
all over
this country, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.”
See, I have a deep-seated problem with authority that has instilled in me a drive to immediately do whatever it is a powerful person says I can’t do. I also have an even deeper-seated desire to be a giant nerd, so this particular act of rebellion took the form of me going to the university library to read absolutely everything I could about presidents. When trying to get back at a teacher, some students will key a car or throw toilet paper at a house. I attacked books with a similar amount of gusto and, no, I
didn’t
think there was anything weird about this (and, no, I
didn’t
get invited to a lot of parties).
I consumed everything I could. Biographies, autobiographies. The journal of John Quincy Adams. The financial records of George Washington. The private letters of Warren G. Harding. Pictures of JFK in a swimsuit. All of it. I was trying to crack a code. I was looking for similarities between not just our greatest presidents, but
all
of our presidents. At the time, only forty-two guys in history had ever taken the job. There must have been
some
trait they all shared, some common bond, some characteristic that linked every president across
two hundred and some-odd years. Something I could study, master, and apply to myself so that I too could one day be president. Not to help the country in any way, just so I could shove it in my professor’s face and then quickly resign. It turns out there
was
one thing I learned in my exhaustive study of all things presidential: