In the White House, the walls don’t have ears. They have voices.
Wander through its corridors, as Donald Trump will soon do, and you might hear the presidential portraits on the walls providing their successors with advice, the sage counsel of the experienced — the wisdom of the ages, shaped by triumph and tragedy in times of joy and despair. Here’s what Trump may hear:
— I think the American people expect more from us than cries of indignation and attack. The times are too grave, the challenge too urgent, and the stakes too high to permit the customary passions of political debate. We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.
These remarks were made by Sen. John F. Kennedy as he accepted the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. His may have been a time of partisan conflict, but it is tame in comparison with ours; his rival in that fall’s election was Richard Nixon, with whom he had reasonably friendly relations.
Trump’s view is more like that nostrum of the British statesman Lord Palmerston, who said that his country had no allies, only interests. A master of cries of indignation and attack, Trump now has won his great goal of a second term and can’t run again. In an ordinary political figure, that would mean forgetting the indignation and muting the anger. The 35th president’s advice to the 47th might be persuasive.
— I have noticed that nothing I never said ever did me any harm.
This is classic advice from Calvin Coolidge, who, unlike the new president, was abstemious with words. His taciturn aspect was ridiculed for decades. Today it’s regarded as wisdom.
— The people’s interest does not permit faithful party work to be always rewarded by appointment to office.
This remark, delivered in an 1885 written message to the National Civil Service Reform League, is from Grover Cleveland, until Trump’s election the only person to win nonconsecutive terms in the White House. It came at a time when the Democrats had not held the presidency for 24 years and when pressure was building to replace what current conservatives would describe as the “deep state.”
The new president eventually filled the executive branch with Democrats, but he made, as biographer Henry F. Graff pointed out, “fewer changes in personnel than Republican predecessors” and nearly doubled the number of federal employees protected from partisan dismissal. This advice might temper the ardor of Trump amid legal questions about his desire to replace bureaucrats with MAGA loyalists — and the determination of Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk to cut the federal workforce substantially.
— I hold the maxim no less applicable to public than to private affairs, that honesty is the best policy.
These remarks are from George Washington’s farewell address to the people of the United States and are as valuable today, when Trump is about to become president, as they were in 1796, when John Adams was about to become president. Trump made 30,573 false or misleading statements in his first term, according to The Washington Post’s fact checker team.
— There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.
Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, might guide Trump as he contemplates pardoning the convicted rioters from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
— I was born for the storm, and a calm does not suit me.
This is the self-evaluation of Andrew Jackson, whose portrait Trump hung in the Oval Office during his first term — and whose historical shine has worn off with increased attention to his slaveholding and his ferocious combat with Native Americans. Trump, too, was born for the storm, but he’ll be older than Joe Biden is now when his second term ends.
Might a bit of calm suit an 82-year-old who would enter retirement with the comforting knowledge that he was the principal figure of his time for as long as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was? Or might he instead agree with Ulysses Grant, who believed that “In every battle there comes a time when both sides consider themselves beaten, then he who continues the attack wins”?
— No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it.
This remark from Theodore Roosevelt in his 1903 State of the Union Address might be sobering to Trump. With a Supreme Court ruling providing the president with immunity, he might consider Roosevelt’s notion irrelevant today. Trump might also hear him say, “If you could kick the person in the pants responsible for most of your trouble, you wouldn’t sit for a month.”
— Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us.
This admonition came from Franklin Delano Roosevelt in a 1938 address in Marietta, Ohio. The 32nd president chose the dedication to the Memorial to the Start Westward of the Nation commemoration and the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the Northwest Territory to address skepticism about the growth of government under his New Deal.
Using the experience of the Ohio pioneers as an object lesson, FDR offered a lesson for his time: “Under such conditions there was so much to get done which men could not get done alone, that the frontiersmen naturally reached out to government as their greatest single instrument of cooperative self-help with the aid of which they could get things done,” he said. “To them the use of government was but another form of the cooperation of good neighbors.”
These remarks might prompt the new president to remember that the head of the government he so reviles is Trump himself.
Postscript: The portraits of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were moved during Trump’s first administration to the Old Family Dining Room, rarely used by the Trumps. It was an effort to ensure that they were out of the vision of Trump’s regular patterns. Biden restored them to the Grand Foyer. We can only wonder what these portraits might whisper to the new occupant of the White House. He might hear Clinton say, “If you live long enough, you’ll make mistakes. But if you learn from them, you’ll be a better person.”
A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
