Well, Thomas Fleming, the noted historian and author, offers a look back at some of the bad things our presidents and would-be-presidents said about each other at the History News Network.
Recently I went to a dinner party at which several guests wondered aloud if the 2012 presidential election was setting some sort of record for nastiness. The two candidates and their spokesmen were calling each other a startling range of names from liar to crook to weakling to would be dictator. I agreed that the rancor was growing intense -- but I assured them that other candidates for and holders of the nation’s highest office had compiled a record that equaled and often exceeded the current epithets.
Enraged by President George Washington’s refusal to support the French Revolution, Thomas Jefferson said he was "a Samson who had allowed himself to be shorn by the harlot, England." Around the same time, an ardent Jefferson supporter, journalist James Thomson Callender, offered a toast at a public dinner "to the speedy death of President Washington."
A few years later, President John Adams, defeated for re-election by Mr. Jefferson, accused him of having "a mean thirst for popularity, an inordinate ambition and a want of sincerity." Adams shuddered at "the calamities" that Jefferson’s policies would soon inflict on the country.
You can read the rest of the piece via the below link;
http://hnn.us/articles/bad-things-presidents-and-would-be-presidents-have-said-about-each-other
No comments:
Post a Comment