U.S. Presidents. Martha’s Vineyard. There’s quite a story here. In recent decades Clinton and Obama showed up every summer like bluefish. And thinking about it, can you blame them? Who wants to hang around Washington in those hot marble buildings with a bunch of noisy Republicans?
And lo, here we are with another election upon us. But before we get into that let’s look back and see how the executive branch tends to bend in this direction.
George Washington. He was inaugurated as the first U.S. president in early 1789. By July of that year, he said he’d just about had it with the job and told his staff he was headed for the beach. He quickly made it to Woods Hole, only to find the ferries out of service.
“I didn’t have this much trouble crossing the Delaware and it was full of ice,” he was reported to have said.
But he did return to the Vineyard several times to fund-raise for his re-election campaign.
John Adams. Being a Massachusetts native, he was known to visit many times. The details of those excursions however are being kept secret by Simon & Schuster pending the release of David McCullough’s next book “Clambake Hints . . . With Love, John and Abigail.”
Thomas Jefferson. Since Virginia can get quite hot in July, young Jefferson was fortunate to stumble upon the Vineyard when he answered an ad for a summer job tutoring material covered on the SATs. He became so fond of the place that as president he would send Lewis and Clark on a crazy trip to the West Coast as a decoy, thinking it would help keep a lid on Vineyard real estate prices. Unfortunately, his legendary feud with John Adams kept him away for many years. Not knowing Adams would live to be 90, “Tisbury Tom” was hoping to return at some point, but as you know, sadly, they died on the same day.
Lincoln. Was he really here? When he relaxed, it was known that Abe liked to get rid of the black suit and tall hat. However, that made him harder to spot and people are not sure if that was him on the beach or just Jason, the hippie carpenter.
FDR. Being a rich Democrat, the Vineyard would have been an obvious choice. Wife Eleanor, meanwhile, had other thoughts: “Franklin, are you crazy? What about Campobello? We just had all 34 rooms repainted and a new dock put in”
JFK. Another silver-spooner, he already had a nice beach place in Hyannis. In addition there’s the obscure historical footnote that he and brother Bobby wanted to use Island waters to play naval war games during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Word of the plan leaked out at a bar on the Cape and the result: no Kennedy was allowed on MV until the summer of 1969.
There it is, quite a history. But what about after the 2020 election? It is probably safe to say we are in something of a hiatus. For some bizarre unknown reason, the two recent Republicans, namely George W. and Le Grande Orange (both native Yankees) prefer the sweltering south in summer.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, is presently known to like beaching it in Rehoboth, Del. But if elected, it is a good bet Joe will start hitting the Vineyard for at least a week every summer. These days it’s probably the best perk of being a Democratic president.
Owen Joyner was formerly an Oak Bluffs coin diver and is now an attorney living in New Orleans and Oak Bluffs.
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September 04, 2020 at 02:08AM
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