This ONE Movie Has Inspired Generations of Presidents — You May be Surprised
…an excerpt from Under This Roof, from Paul Brandus of the award-winning West Wing Reports — now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Want a signed copy? Email Paul: westwingrpt@gmail.com
Presidents and movies date to the beginning of the film industry itself. OnMarch 21, 1915, the first movie was screened in the White House for Woodrow Wilson; unfortunately, it was D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, a celebratory look at the Ku Klux Klan. The film, which sparked protests and riots across the nation, was a surprising choice for Wilson, the intellectual former president of Princeton University. His secretary Joseph Tumulty claimed “the President was entirely unaware of the nature of the play before it was presented and at no time has expressed his approbation of it.”
There was no White House theater in Wilson’s time. He watched movies on the second floor of the White House, in the long Central Hall, and later in the East Room. Wilson, who had suffered a paralyzing stroke in October 1919 that nearly killed him, watched a film every day during his final year in office; chief White House usher Ike Hoover “scoured the universe” to ensure that the ailing president saw a different one each day.
The theater that exists today was built in 1942, when Franklin Roosevelt had it converted from a cloakroom called the “Hat Box.” Roosevelt, whose Fireside Chats on the radio reflected his media savvy, was equally shrewd about the power of movies. He knew that both reached millions while transcending racial, gender, and class divides.30 He cultivated Hollywood, subtly enlisting producers and stars. As with his campaigns, it worked: FDR was depicted more times on the silver screen — in both fiction and nonfiction — than any other president, and in keeping with his wishes, he was never shown in a wheelchair or with a handicap. Roosevelt was as much a movie fan as anyone else. During the Depression he was known to enjoy I’m No Angel, a 1933 comedy starring Mae West and Cary Grant — along with Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Mickey Mouse cartoons. During World War II, he watched newsreels of American troops in Europe and the Pacific.
Presidents from the heartland opted for westerns. Missouri’s favorite son, Harry Truman, loved My Darling Clementine starring Henry Fonda. But Truman’s preferred pastime was an evening of poker with the boys, and he used the theater infrequently. Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to use the theater extensively, and the man from Abilene watched just about anything with a cowboy in it. The White House projectionist in the 1950s, Paul Fischer, kept a handwritten log of everything Ike watched — more than two hundred movies over eight years — and said one of the president’s all-time favorites was High Noon. Perhaps Eisenhower, the World War II general known for his righteousness and modesty, identified with the film’s small town marshal (Gary Cooper) who faces down a gang of killers all by himself.
The theme resonated with many presidents, including Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, each of whom said that High Noon was a particular favorite (Clinton said he watched it some twenty times).
John F. Kennedy watched forty-eight movies in the White House, preferring thrillers and manly movies like Spartacus, From Here to Eternity, and Bridge on the River Kwai. Yet during the tense Cuban Missile Crisis — when the United States and Soviet Union came close to nuclear war — he unwound one night by watching Audrey Hepburn’s Roman Holiday. Not surprisingly, JFK was also a James Bond fan, and enjoyed the first 007 thriller Dr. No. Kennedy, a notorious womanizer, no doubt identified with how 007 always bedded a beautiful woman or two while saving the world from disaster. But Dr. No was the only Bond film he would see. The second 007 movie, From Russia With Love, was shown in the White House theater on November 21, 1963. Staffers predicted that the president — who was in Texas — would enjoy it.
Two of Lyndon Johnson’s favorite movies were the John Wayne classic The Searchers and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which a white girl introduces her black boyfriend to her parents. The latter undoubtedly appealed to LBJ’s quest for civil rights during his administration. In general though, LBJ wasn’t a movie buff — unless he was the star. In 1966 he commissioned the US Information Agency to produce a movie about himself, which was to be shown overseas. The ten-minute short, A President’s Country, was a yawner — except in the White House theater, where Johnson was known to watch it over and over.
Richard Nixon truly enjoyed movies, especially if they featured larger-than-life characters. He was a huge fan of Patton, the biopic about the bombastic World War II general George S. Patton, and watched it at least five times. Some critics have suggested that it influenced his decision, in the spring of 1970, to order the US invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. During a 1977 interview with the British journalist David Frost, Nixon denied being influenced by the film.
The White House theater saw little use during Gerald Ford’s short presidency. “I’m not a moviegoer,” he wrote, “never have been.” In handwritten notes for his memoirs, he said he sometimes watched comedies and musicals “because they are relaxing,” but didn’t name any particular favorites. Ford did enjoy “historical documentaries because they are educational and therefore interesting.” But other movies, he continued, “don’t interest me. I don’t dislike them but if I have a choice I prefer other entertainment.”
George H. W. Bush also enjoyed thrillers; The Hunt for Red October, based on the Tom Clancy spy thriller, was one of his favorites, but in general the forty-first president pursued outdoor recreation like fishing and golf. But his successor, Bill Clinton, was captivated by the movies. “You could go to the movies for a dime when I was a little boy,” he told Roger Ebert, “and so I saw every movie that came my way when I was a child and I spent a lot of time in the movies. They fired my imagination, they inspired me, you know.” As president, he continued to be a regular moviegoer. “I try to see everything,” and the theater, he insisted, was the greatest of presidential perks — even better than Air Force One or Camp David.
His tastes were so varied — everything from Schindler’s List to the Naked
Gun movies, that it’s hard to characterize him. One of his favorites (besides High Noon) was The Harmonists, an obscure 1999 film about a popular vocal group in Nazi Germany that was forced to disband because it had Jewish singers. “God, it was a moving thing,” Clinton recalled. He watched the film amid ongoing peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority: a timely reminder, perhaps, about the importance of Israeli security.
George W. Bush’s movie habits can generally be divided into two periods: those he watched before the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and those he watched after. In terms of the former period, he enjoyed the satirical Austin Powers series; in the latter he opted for more serious fare: We Were Soldiers, about Vietnam, and Black Hawk Down, about US troops in Somalia in 1993. In 2006, he screened United 93, a film about one of the planes hijacked on September 11th.
Barack Obama said in a 2008 interview that The Godfather and Lawrence of Arabia were among his favorites. “I’m a movie guy,” he said. Also mentioned by Obama: Casablanca, which literally translates into, of course, White House.
But the all-time presidential moviegoer appears to be a president who was only in the White House for one term: Jimmy Carter. He saw an estimated 480 movies during his four years in office — about ten per month. Like Clinton, his tastes varied, from the first film he watched as president — and one that helped put him there — All the President’s Men about Watergate, to Midnight Cowboy, which originally had been X-rated.
Like many Americans, he used movies as an escape. On September 21, 1977, he screened The Longest Yard, “so that we could forget about the day’s events.” His budget director Bert Lance had just resigned amid allegations of financial wrongdoing.
21 Presidents, 21 rooms, 21 insider stories. That’s “Under This Roof,” by Paul Brandus of the award-winning White House-based news service West Wing Reports. Now available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble . Want a signed copy? Email Paul: westwingrpt@gmail.com— and follow Paul on Twitter: @WestWingReport
