Last year someone scooped up a bunch of doodles at Tony Blair’s seat at the annual Davos economic summit. Graphologists had a field day interpreting them. Analysts deemed Blair to be struggling with his concentration, “not a natural leader”, and “an unstable man who is feeling under enormous pressure”. Then it was learnt that the doodles were actually drawn by Bill Gates. Blair’s entourage could scarcely conceal their delight in responding to the news.
We were all disappointed that Blair did not reveal himself – a doodle by a world leader gives us a rare glimpse, in this age of relentless image management, of his spontaneous side. If anything, American presidents are all the more image-conscious, which is perhaps why these drawings are so revealing: they capture the playful, primitive and absurd aspects of presidents, not normally seen in their public pronouncements.
For Franklin Delano Roosevelt, doodles show the passions he had away from the Oval Office. A fisherman, he was keen on drawing boats and fish; as a genealogist, he liked to sketch his family name and crest. His other great leisure pursuit was ordinary-sounding – stamp-collecting. He hauled his vast collection to wartime summits at Yalta and Casablanca in a steamer trunk. He designed stamps for the US postal service, including one in honour of Mother’s Day.
While FDR drew the subjects of his hobbies, drawing was Dwight D Eisenhower’s hobby. Ike often worked at his easel with the television on. Painting even rivalled another famous pastime for his affection. “I’ve often thought,” he once wrote, “what a wonderful thing it would be to install a compact painting outfit in a golf cart.” Ike couldn’t bring his easel into cabinet meetings. Instead he would take out his pencil and doodle on his daily agendas, FBI reports, or whatever paper he had before him. He drew still-life objects that were solid, sturdy and unremarkable – rather like Ike himself. On one memo, from June 28, 1954, Eisenhower was clearly preoccupied with the American-backed coup in Guatemala that had just forced the popularly elected leftist president, Jacobo Arbenz, to resign. Eisenhower wrote the words “internal security” and sketched a small flotilla of boats at sea, as if headed southward to restore order. Presiding over it all was a portrait of the president himself as a young man, looking trim, and sporting – as he always did in these self-portraits – a full head of hair.
John F Kennedy’s doodles also bear the imprint of cold-war drama. In meetings, JFK was known to radiate an electric energy, which he expressed through his fingers – “drumming the table, tapping his teeth, slashing impatient pencil lines on a pad”, as his aide, the historian Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, wrote. On a given page, words like “Vietnam” or even “Iraq” would recur, often encased in sharply drawn rectangular boxes.
During the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, when Kennedy had to stop the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev from installing missiles 90 miles from American shores, JFK wrote Fidel Castro’s name on a piece of White House stationery.
He added with a directive (to himself?) to blockade Cuba, and a sketch of a small dinghy that hardly seemed up to the task of keeping Soviet ships from reaching Castro.
Kennedy’s boats, however, were not limited to one or two doodles. He drew them constantly; a favourite model was his own sloop, which he named the Victura – the boat on which he taught Jackie to sail. Of all the doodles in Kennedy’s oeuvre, the freest, most elegant-looking is also one of a boat, outlined in four simple lines and gliding on a sea rendered with quick pencil strokes and four little waves. The picture was completed the evening before Kennedy met his death in Dallas.
Kennedy’s energy in his doodles is contained; that of his successor, Lyndon B Johnson, is out of control. A man of gargantuan appetites, Johnson ate, drank and smoked with abandon. He would unzip his flies in front of a colleague, show off his penis and say: “Have you ever seen anything as big as this?” The same lack of restraint informs his doodles: violently drawn, scary-looking animals with spiky ears, three heads or multiple legs.
Johnson guarded his doodles obsessively. “On board the presidential jet,” the journalist David Halberstam once wrote, “he often doodled as he spoke with reporters, and if he left to talk with someone else and noted a reporter moving to pick up a scrap of presidential doodle, he did not find it beneath him to walk back and snatch it away.”
Compared with Johnson, Richard Nixon was downright inhibited. “Any letting my hair down, I find that embarrassing,” he said. This cramped his doodling style. In an unintentional pun, he once described himself as “a square doodler” – not only lacking in hipness, but also prone to drawing “squares and diamonds”. Occasionally he could also turn out a real gem.
Of all the US presidents, Ronald Reagan was perhaps the most comfortable with pencil and napkin. Early in his life he considered a career as a cartoonist, and he mastered a repertoire of classic American types circa 1930: the football player in a stiff-arm pose, the monocled plutocrat, the rugged cowboy (who always bore a strong resemblance to Reagan himself). Like his presidential rhetoric, his doodles evoked a series of warm associations with an idealised American past. This was how Reagan saw the world.
Reagan often doodled for his wife, Nancy. His notes to her – studded with little hearts or tears to show his sadness at her absence – overflow with teenage emotion, embarrassing terms of endearment (“Dear Mommie, Poo Pants”) and cute furry animals. When Nancy published some of these in a book of his letters, it was tempting to see the move as a public-relations manoeuvre. In truth, Reagan had always used his doodles as PR. He proudly gave them to friends, colleagues, and “pen pals” who sent him fan letters. By showing off his doodling, Reagan underscored his boyishness and lack of pretension, to offset the tough-guy image he otherwise cultivated.
Previously, the doodle might be said to express the private impulses of the American leader. But with Reagan, even this last remnant of unscripted presidential communication was co-opted by a politician who cannily understood how much, in the modern age, the personal had truly become the political.
Presidents after Reagan have been loath to disclose their doodles. Despite a 1978 law mandating the release of most presidential records, George Bush Sr found a loophole to deem reams of official documentation off limits to the public. Bill Clinton, too, has refused to make any available for publication, and his presidential library in Arkansas, having just opened, has yet to yield any either. The present incumbent has also rejected requests for doodles – surpassing even the paranoid Richard Nixon (who was willing to draw doodles for collectors) in his secretiveness in this respect.
Clinton and the Bushes have had personal details splashed across the newspapers that are far more embarrassing than any silly drawings. But in this age of intense scrutiny, they have failed to learn the lesson from Reagan: that a few sops towards the disclosure of their private business can go a long way towards blunting the desire for inquiries into their public business.
Presidential Doodles, by David Greenberg and Cabinet Magazine, is published by Basic Books, price £14.99. It is available at the BooksFirst price of £13.49 including postage and packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585
