Foreword from Presidential Doodles

DOODLER IN CHIEF Decisions, decisions. Decisions . . . decisions . . . decisions.
The word is written seventeen times over by John F. Kennedy—“underlined, boxed in, and crossed out” as a reporter noted—on a yellow legal pad in 1961, not long after he took office. Actually, the word is misspelled seventeen times over as “decesions,” but no matter . . . who would ever see it? Millions, as it turned out: In the wake of Kennedy’s assassination, a collection of his doodles, which included sailboats, underlined words, and overlapping boxes, went on a memorial tour of twenty-three cities in the summer of 1964. The exhibit attracted throngs of visitors; they solemnly filed past, eager to view the simple remains of a complex life. It was not always thus; for although not impossible, one cannot very easily doodle with, say, a sharpened goose feather. Writing with a quill is a deliberative task. First, you must painstakingly cut your quill: take a sharp penknife and use its blade back to scrape the quill’s surface; and then, using the blade edge, cut a sharp, angled nib with a small and precise slit in the middle. A slip of the blade, and you’ll need to start all over again—or, perhaps, get yourself a bandage. All this rather takes the fun out of scribbling googly-eyed faces, lazy spirals, and appallingly disproportionate dogs that sport gigantic rows of teeth. And so you begin to see why there are not too many Founding Doodlers. Even a properly sharpened quill is damnably difficult to write with: it is inconsistent, it needs constant dipping, and it dulls quickly. The labor of quill writing meant that an eighteenth-century meeting required a secretary to take notes: others were not expected to trouble themselves with writing, and the secretary was certainly not allowed to doodle. Today, however, Washington teems with meetings at which every person in attendance has their own pen and paper. We can loop endless circles without spilling or running out of ink, indeed without looking down at what we are doing. Even this happy state of modern affairs couldn’t always be taken for granted: back in 1959, the first American manufacturer of ballpoints found a public so wary that, to make the ultramodern device seem more reassuringly familiar, it had to disguise ballpoints as pencils by encasing them in wood. In fact, three things needed to happen before doodling could become, if not the Sport of Kings, at least the Fidget of Presidents. The first was the invention of the steel-nibbed pen. Like any terribly useful invention, nobody can quite agree on its origins. One of the earliest accounts places a steel pen in the hand of a certain Peregrine Williamson, a Baltimore jeweler in the first few years of the 1800s. Peregrine was terrible at cutting quills; in desperation, he contrived a sort of steel quill that would never need sharpening. He didn’t keep his jerry-rigged contraption to himself for long, though: soon, he was making $600 a month from his invention. By 1823, the Englishman James Perry was mass-producing them, and a new generation of children learned to write with the newfangled metal quill. “The Metallic pen is in the ascendant, and the glory of goosedom has departed forever,” one textbook stated flatly. But then there’s the matter of paper. Paper was manufactured from old rags, and by the age of the steel pen, demand was outstripping the national supply of used underwear and grubby bonnets: paper was expensive, and not the sort of thing you’d waste on aimless scribbles. Everything from hay to hemp was tried out as a substitute material, with mixed results at best. It took the German inventor Friedrich Keller, in 1843, to develop the first recognizably modern process for mass-producing paper out of ground wood pulp. The resulting product was easily shipped via burgeoning rail systems. Soon, paper was abundant; it was sold by the pad, the memo book, and the sheaf. Writing itself became looser and more doodle-like. Itinerant penmanship instructors, often juggling other fashionable sidelines in daguerreotyping and cutting silhouettes, distinguished themselves in the mid-1800s with manuals featuring ever-more baroque swirls and flourishes, not to mention fanciful drawings of angels, birds, and grinning fish; indeed, the title page of at least one textbook is so covered with this calligraphic frippery that the words themselves are obliterated. But by the time of Abraham Lincoln, a generation of children had grown up with increasingly affordable pencils and steel pens. These youngsters practiced flourishes, repeated words over and over, and sketched out fanciful beasts in cheap notebooks and on the endpapers of Latin grammars—and, just as their schoolmasters had claimed, a few would grow up to be president.

Republicans are the greatest doodlers.

Now before any Democrat takes offense, it may console them to know that in nineteenth-century parlance a “doodler” was also a corrupt politician. But when it comes to conventional figurative drawing, Republican presidents do hold a clear lead: they can draw Tippy the Turtle, and they did draw the Pirate. Reagan often handed out his correspondence-course-style drawings as prizes at meetings; the Eisenhower administration was so fond of paint-by-numbers kits that an aide prodded the cabinet and visitors into creating a de facto White House gallery of kitsch. (The Eisenhower Library’s paint-by-the-numbers collection includes Swiss Village, painted by J. Edgar Hoover, and Old Mill, painted by Ethel Merman.) And Herbert Hoover was so well-known for his ornate geometrical patterns that autograph dealers were already scooping them up while he was still in office. In 1930, one collector even copied some of Hoover’s patterns onto fabric and unveiled a line of “Hoover Scribble Rompers” for young children.

Other White House doodles were not so openly exhibited, for the notion that a doodle gives insight into a troubled psyche had quite a vogue in the mid-twentieth century. Aides to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were instructed to carefully gather up his many doodles after meetings, lest they reveal a psychological insight to spies. But then, Dulles also knew that a well-placed doodle can be a weapon. He infuriated Soviet foreign minister Molotov during negotiations by doodling constantly and by his habit of pointedly pausing to sharpen his pencil with a knife. It was no less disconcerting when an American negotiator noticed Josef Stalin idly using a red pencil to draw hearts with little question marks inside.

And although presidential doodles have managed to stay clear of trouble, other doodling in the White House can cause the occasional sticky situation. Attorney General Elliott Richardson not only irritated Richard Nixon by his doodling—“He thought I wasn’t paying attention,” the former Harvard Lampoon cartoonist explained—he very nearly scotched his own cabinet nomination by doodling through his confirmation hearings, causing senators to accuse him of arrogance. Hugh Johnson, FDR’s Depression-era head of the National Recovery Administration, was caught scratching the word “HELL” into his memo pad during one press conference; more recently, the baroquely doodled notes of George W. Bush’s speechwriter Michael Gerson have also raised eyebrows. “If these ever become part of the Presidential records,” the New York Times quoted Karl Rove joking to Gerson, “future historians will say that some deranged person was near the President.”
Indeed.
But what do doodles mean? Although some have appreciated Hoover’s doodles, for instance, for their purely visual qualities—in 1968, the painter Lois Thayer actually exhibited twenty-five canvases based on Hoover’s scratch pads—others have tried to divine his personality from them. In 1982, Time magazine submitted presidential doodles to a “graphologist,” who opined that Hoover was “the most confused” president, while an attempt by the New York Times in 1947 saw their expert deeming Hoover “feverishly active and well-organized.” Not to be outdone, London newspapers recently pounced on a paper left on Prime Minister Tony Blair’s table after an economic summit; they hired graphologists, and even a clairvoyant, and smugly announced that Blair’s doodles revealed him to be mentally unstable, impractical, and unable to finish tasks. Unfortunately, their combined expertise failed to notice that the doodle didn’t belong to Blair, Bush, or to any other head of state at all. The allegedly ineffectual and hazy-minded doodler turned out to be the software billionaire Bill Gates—a fellow who, one gathers, can doodle whatever he likes.

Doodles rarely reveal clear insight into a person beyond what is immediately on their mind. In 1942, the American Institute of Laundering announced that a survey of commercial laundries found that restaurant tablecloths had been pressed into wartime doodle service by civilians, as “90 percent of doodling on tablecloths today is concerned with war strategy” in the form of crudely drawn maps and arrows. “Laundry operators are not over-impressed with the brilliance of the strategy shown by the doodlers,” one report dryly noted. And yet such obvious planning is noticeably absent from presidential doodles: their very ordinariness is a cipher.

Perhaps this is why doodles are so compelling. If they are significant, it is not because they are great art or the products of great men. It is because they are ordinary, and historians have fought to preserve open-access laws so that presidential doodles can be so ordinary. Anyone can view them—they belong to us. And when we view them, we see that they resemble our own words and our own idle lines. The drawing or scrawled comment on a yellow pad is like an ancient cave painting: a familiar image, but from an unimaginable distance of time and situation.

--Paul Collins

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