The farm would have been at its summer peak, and one may imagine John and Abigail walking their fields together, John glad for home ground beneath his feet again and delighting in the look of things under her management. There would be hard cider again, to start the day...
David McCullough, John Adams, page 218
The morning bourbon - an ounce of Old Grandad or Wild Turkey taken after the two-mile walk and a few setting-up exercises and the rubdown that usually followed the morning walk - had also become routine.
David McCullough, Truman, page 857-8
Andrew Jackson couldn't have been less like the snobbish Virginian presidents who had preceded him. Gone were the crystal decanters of Madeira on the White House breakfast table, replaced, per Jackson's orders, with simple corn likker in brown jugs marked with an unmistakable XXX--the "true Presidential seal," as Jackson joked one morning to his valet, Caleb Stuart. Stuart-- whose duties as Presidential Valet, as was traditional then, included running the United States west of the Mississippi -- came to admire Jackson. "I would come in and wake him up with, you know, a hair of the dog," remembered Stuart, "And oh! - he was a difficult man to wake up. But, after he flogged me, he always offer me some whiskey out of his own jug."
Hangovers, in fact, brought forth a spirit of presidential improvisation unimaginable for today's hyperscheduled chief executives. Theodore Roosevelt was not only an expert horseman and amateur bowdlerizer of Catullus, but also an inveterate tinkerer with morning-after libations. Once, after an evening's shooting at the British ambassador, Lord Fanciman-Mincington, T.R. awoke with a blinding headache and, as he wrote in a letter to his six-year-old son, then at boarding school,
...a thirst you could photograph. Lord F-M came in to see how your poppa was doing. I shot at him again, for fun, and he laughed and recommended a cocktail Kipling had showed him called The White Man's Burden, but your poppa substituted good old-fashioned rye whiskey and rechristened it the Manifest Destiny. We spent the rest of the morning drinking and shooting and declaiming aloud from The Influence of Sea-Power upon History. It was grand!
But greeting the day with a glass of liquid sunshine was far from a male preserve, for many--perhaps the only--admirable Presidents were just as devoted to their wives as to their beloved pastime. An Eisenhower painting entitled "Mamie In Bed With Mr. Boston" bears this out, although the painting was irreparably damaged when it was used as a coaster. To this day, however, you can ask any Washington barman for a "Flamey Mamie" at breakfast and receive a refreshing concoction of Gin, Merlot and fire in a sugar-rimmed highball glass.
At the other end of the spectrum was Lucy Webb Hayes, wife of Rutherford B. Hayes. Popular hostess of the day, fierce abolitionist, and inventor of the annual Easter Egg roll, Mrs. Hayes was an outspoken advocate for temperance. It was her powerful influence that impelled President Hayes to ban wine and spirits from the White House entirely, save for his eight-to-noon "morning medicine," which he shared with his inner circle, a group he affectionately called "the usual gang of idiots": Mark Twain, Harriet Tubman, Mexican industrialist Jose Cuervo, and a wooden cigar-store Indian who, in keeping with the simple, unaffected racism of the time, they named Heap Big.
In the end, though, Lucy Hayes got her wish--Presidential eye-openers appear to be a thing of the past, and mornings in America will have to go on without our leaders drinking during them. But, like an extended afternoon nap, their legacy lingers on in the pages of bestselling biographies and the flasks of furtive commuters.
And Heap Big? He went out on top when Ronald Reagan appointed him Acting Secretary of Health and Human Services. He now serves on the board of the Washington Redskins.