When the Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, announced his bid for the Presidency, the question had to be asked: is he eligible – for office, that is? Isn’t there an unofficial rule that American presidents have to be married? For Graham is a singleton: never married, never widowed. For years, he has been dogged by rumors that he is in the closet. And so the question grows: could an unmarried Republican plagued by speculation about his sexuality ever win the election?
Were Senator Graham to become the Leader of the Free World, he would be joining a surprisingly long list of Presidents who were bachelors while in office. James Buchanan was the only President to stay a bachelor before, during, and after his presidency. However, our “first gay president” – as Buchanan has been called– had a longstanding, live-in relationship with William Rufus DeVane King, the Senator from Alabama, who would become 13th Vice President of the United States under Franklin Pierce. Those elections took place in the mid-19th century. Americans didn’t have motorcars or telephones, and gay marriage wasn't even thinkable, let alone a thing. Poor Buchanan and King were forced to openly cohabitate as the Ace and Gary of their time: an ambiguously gay political duo successfully reaching the highest offices in the land. But life-long bachelor Buchanan isn't the only singleton to hold the office.
Six other past presidents were single during all or portions of their time in the White House. Three men remained widowers through their terms: Martin Van Buren was widowed a few years before being elected, and never remarried. Andrew Jackson became a widower shortly after being elected president, and never remarried. Benjamin Harrison lost his wife near the end of his presidency, remarrying a younger woman after he left office. Two more presidents – John Tyler and Woodrow Wilson -- were widowers who remarried while in office. Finally, Grover Cleveland was the second President to be elected as a bachelor (the first being Buchanan) but the first to marry in office. In 1886, his wedding to 21-year-old Frances Folsom took place at the White House.
When Michael Douglas played widower Andrew Shepherd in "The American President," 1995, he was following a well-established pattern. So to answer the burning question, “Is an unmarried candidate eligible to be President?” The answer is: Yes! The President can hold office without being straight-married or opposite-married (though that would be something to see), irrespective of whether that “need” is dictated by social convention or (bore, snore) Constitutional mandate. Still, it has been exactly one century since a singleton President sat in the Oval Office; the last widower was Woodrow Wilson, who married Edith Bolling Galt in 1915.
Everybody loves a political fairy tale. Given the fawning American press coverage of the wedding of William & Kate, we’re way overdue for another love story on the White House lawn. When reporters pressed Graham for details about his personal life, the senator ripped a page from Andrew Jackson’s playbook and suggested the possibility of a “rotating first lady” in his White House. Swoon! A real life Bachelor as the POTUS, with the final rose handed out in the Rose Garden? That’s even better than the prospect of The Donald yelling, “You’re fired!™” to all the members of Congress.
I confess that the phrase, “rotating first lady,” made me think of the twirling ballerina in my music box, but I don’t think this is what he meant. Of course, there is another, less frivolous way to think about Graham’s candidacy and its fictional possibilities. The whole reason why many of these past Presidents were single was because their wives and ladyfriends were dead.
To be sure, dying in the White House is not exactly uncommon. Four presidents died of natural causes: William Henry Harrison (1841, pneumonia); Zachary Taylor (1850, acute gastroenteritis); Warren G. Harding (1923, apoplexy); and Franklin D. Roosevelt (1945, cerebral hemorrhage). And four presidential assassinations furnish the backstory for Brad Meltzer’s bestselling “Culper Ring” series, which knits together the deaths of Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), and John F. Kennedy (1963) using the thick yarns of an old-fashioned conspiracy. The latest installation in Meltzer’s series, published earlier this month, opens with the First Lady doing a spot of gardening and digging up a severed human arm. Whose arm is it? Read the book to find out! Still, the Agatha Christie in me yearns for a novel series reset where a fictional First Lady is first wooed by the bachelor president, then turns up as the dead body in the garden, setting off an investigation that leads to nefarious plans and nasty political secrets being revealed.
In real life, four First Ladies died in or near the White House: Rachel Jackson (1828), Letitia Tyler (1842), Caroline Harrison (1892) and Ellen Wilson (1914). History has forgotten these presidential wives, and so have the TV writers. But somebody should take a stab at dramatizing their lives, because this material is thick with potential.
On the whole, the women of the White House were a sickly bunch, with a striking number strongly linked to various forms of insanity. Consider Ellen Wilson, whose life sounds like a soap opera: “Her mother died in childbirth, her father went insane, she was branded as a man-hater by potential suitors and her brother and his young family were killed in a freak carriage accident.” Later, she contemplated suicide, but it was Bright’s Disease – now known as chronic nephritis (kidney disease) -- that killed her, age 54, while Woodrow was still in office.
It gets worse – or better, depending on your tastes. The tragic afflictions of Mary Lincoln are so well known they barely need repeating. (They included bipolar disorder, traumatic grief, and multiple attempts at suicide.) Louisa Adams hated being First Lady so much she refused to leave her bedroom. So many women and children died on the road to the White House that I lost count. These snippets suggest the teacup tensions of "Arsenic and Old Lace," of lethal impulses crocheted into cozies and the steady drip, drip, drip of small miseries that end up fracturing minds.
Seeing the history of the White House through their woebegone eyes ends up holding up a dark mirror to the high drama of national politics, showing how little society has progressed despite constantly bleating about “progress.” People may not die of Bright’s disease and apoplexy any more, but renaming these illnesses “nephritis” and “stroke” doesn’t prevent them from being fatal. And, despite basking in a technotopia where $4.99 dinners microwave from sea to shining sea, even the most liberal of today’s voters demand a married man and woman in the White House, preferably of proven fertility, and they’d better have a photogenic dog or don’t even bother running.
Hypothetically speaking, if Lindsey Graham becomes the President, his sister could become First Lady, as she is his only family. Darline is also his daughter, because he adopted her. When your sister is your daughter and you’re also from the South, the tired punchlines come thick and fast. But sometimes doing the right thing looks like the wrong thing merely because it's upside-down or twisted. First Graham lost his mother, then his father, leaving him orphaned and in charge of his much younger sister. Technically speaking, then, Lindsey Graham is an adoptive single father with a tragic past in need of a political dancing partner. As reality TV shows go, it would be impossible not to watch.
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