Books: Who's Fillmore? What's He Done?

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PRESIDENTIAL ANECDOTES by Paul F. Boiler Jr.; Oxford; 410 pages; $14.95

Nowhere does the Constitution stipulate that the nation's Chief Executive must be witty or charming or colorful. Strictly constructing, Presidents have every legal right to be stiffs. A goodly number of them have been. This unavoidable fact makes Presidential Anecdotes a rather remote relation to The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes (1975), which roamed freely and often hilariously over centuries' worth of British biography and gossip. Historian Paul F. Boiler Jr. had to confine himself to the 39 Americans who, for better or worse, served among the acknowledged legislators of the world. Abraham Lincoln is here, but so, unavoidably, are James K. Polk, Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore.

Yet the material that Boiler has culled is fascinating even when the Presidents are not. Fillmore may have gone down in history as a nonentity, but it is rather touching to learn that he anticipated, and agreed with, this verdict. In 1855 he declined an honorary degree from Oxford University. He seemed eager to avoid the disdain that Oxford students heaped on outsiders: "They would probably ask, 'Who's Fillmore? What's he done?' "

From George Washington on, those elected to the nation's highest office found themselves variously confounded by conflicting demands. They were supposed to be of the people but a little above them, too; woe to them if they did not run the Executive Branch efficiently, and equal woe if they failed at improvident spellbinding. Small talk seems to have flummoxed some of them. During the 1824 campaign, John Quincy Adams was approached by an old farmer, who said: "My wife, when she was a gal, lived in your father's family; you were then a little boy; and she has often combed your head." Adams' reply effectively sank the exchange: "Well, I suppose she combs yours now." William Howard Taft's advisers desperately tried to hide his poor memory for names and faces. It did not work. Approached by a voter at one rally, Taft blurted out: "They tell me I ought to remember you, but bless my soul, I cannot recall you at all."

Then there was the matter of pressing the flesh. Polk and William McKinley both developed extensive theories about the best way to shake many hands without pain or injury; Lyndon Johnson could extend a normal greeting into something like a mugging. Some Presidents failed handshaking. Benjamin Harrison's grip was likened to "a wilted petunia," while one newsman described Woodrow Wilson's as "a ten-cent pickled mackerel in brown paper."