“How To Fight Presidents,” a new book by presidential obsessive Daniel O’Brien assesses our most badass presidents — the brawlers, drinkers, gunslingers and killers — and hilariously contrasts them with our weaker, less impressive leaders. For every US president who liked getting it on in below-freezing outdoor locales was another who could only eat the equivalent of baby food.
(Note: Still-living presidents were left out of the book due to Secret Service concerns. When asked about our current president, O’Brien places him in neither the top nor bottom five, noting that on one hand, he’s in prime shape, but on the other, the best presidential fighters had a win-at-all-costs intensity, as opposed to Obama’s perpetual cool.)
American Badasses
George Washington
His resolve during the Revolutionary War was so strong that he enjoyed being shot at, once writing to his brother, “There is something charming to the sound of bullets.”
Washington would “return from many battles unscathed but with bullet holes in his clothing,” and “two different horses . . . shot out from under him in the same battle. This happened so many times that Washington admitted . . . that he could not be killed in battle. He genuinely believed this, and the crazy part? We have no way to prove him wrong.”
John Quincy Adams
Adams exercised two to five hours a day, which O’Brien says was his way of “torturing himself for not being perfect.” He also soaked in ice baths, and “rubbed his body down with a horsehair mitten,” which is “painful as hell.”
Adams also bragged about having sex naked in zero-degree weather.
“If he brings that passion to his fight with you, you can assume that he’s going to punch directly through you, then punch through whatever ground you were standing on, then punch any memories of you out of existence, and then punch himself a few times for not beating you quite hard enough.”
Andrew Jackson
As a colonial solider, Jackson was captured by the British at age 13. After sustaining a gash to the cheek for refusing to shine his captor’s shoes, he was “forced to march shoeless, wound undressed, without food or water, for 40 miles while suffering from smallpox.”
As an adult, he was in 13 duels “that we know of,” including the time he allowed his opponent to shoot first. The man hit Jackson near the heart, then Jackson killed him. One of his biggest deathbed regrets was not having murdered his vice president.
Abraham Lincoln
Years of log splitting made Lincoln’s strength a local legend; neighbors claimed he could lift thousand-pound boulders.
When he moved to New Salem, Ill., he fought and defeated every member of a local gang. He grabbed their leader “by the throat, lifted him off his feet, shook him like a child and then tossed him when he surrendered.”
When opponents spoke badly of bills he proposed, our greatest orator and writer threatened to punch them in the face.
Theodore Roosevelt
“Without question the most badass president we have ever had or will ever have.” Roosevelt, a sickly child, spent his youth making his body strong, taking up — and excelling at — running, hunting, boxing and wrestling.
Roosevelt believed that fearlessness was a state of mind. When a man in a saloon pulled two pistols on him, called him “Four Eyes” and ordered him to buy drinks, Roosevelt “gave the armed moron three quick punches to the face.”
He “kept a bear and a lion in the White House as pets” and after a madman shot Roosevelt in the chest while he was en route to give a speech, he still went and spoke for an hour and a half, “with the bleeding, undressed bullet hole in his chest.”
“Can you out-Roosevelt Roosevelt?” O’Brien asks. “Spoiler alert: No.”
The frail and the useless
Martin Van Buren
A “sh***y guy” whose only passion in life was for slavery. Davy Crockett called him a “dandy” who would walk around “laced up in corsets . . . It would be difficult to say, from his personal appearance, whether he was a man or woman.”
Millard Fillmore
His only remotely badass accomplishment was forming a militia in the Civil War. However, it was “a militia of men over 45,” and “the only ‘action’ they saw involved marching in parades.”
Grover Cleveland
At 250 unfit pounds, Cleveland was “a gelatinous mound of a man” who “loathed exercise,” even once saying, “Bodily movement alone is among the dreary and unsatisfying things of life.”
Woodrow Wilson
O’Brien calls Wilson “a walking sack of death,” as he was “blind in one eye . . . suffered constant crushing headaches and lived with recurring stomach pain.” He also had numerous strokes and got to the point where he could only eat “predigested foods.”
Calvin Coolidge
Asthmatic and weak, Coolidge had no military or athletic experience. “Probably the most exercise he ever got,” O’Brien writes, “was walking around” and engaging in his favorite pastime: window shopping.
How To Fight Presidents
Defending Yourself Against The Badasses Who Ran This Country
by Daniel O’Brien
Three Rivers Press