Dry outlook for alcohol-free White House
After four years under Donald Trump, America is to be led by another teetotaller.
Senator Ted Kennedy once described nights at the White House when it was occupied by President Carter. “The first thing you would be reminded of, in case you needed reminding, was that he and Rosalynn had removed all the liquor in the White House,” he wrote in his memoir. “He wanted no luxuries nor any sign of worldly living.”
At the time Mr Carter’s teetotal presidency was an exception in Washington; now it seems to be the rule. After four years under President Trump, a drinker of Diet Coke, America is to be led by another teetotaller.
Like Mr Trump, Mr Biden has said he was put off booze by the sight of alcoholism among his relatives. His mother’s family was a sprawling, Irish-Catholic clan in Pennsylvania. One of his favourite uncles, known as Boo-Boo because of his stutter, was a big drinker. Mr Biden suffered from a stutter too, which he says he overcame by standing before his bedroom mirror, reciting the poetry of WB Yeats and passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson. He also decided, at an early age, to avoid drinking. “There are enough alcoholics in my family,” he told reporters in 2008, as he sipped cranberry juice aboard a train from Washington to his home town of Wilmington, Delaware.
The evening train rides home, which were a feature of Mr Biden’s early career as a senator and widower, rushing back to his children, meant that he avoided the capital’s social scene, where nights of hard drinking were sometimes credited for helping to forge cross-party alliances.
Mr Trump has said watching his older brother, Fred, struggle with alcoholism and die at the age of 40 caused him to avoid drinking.
President Barack Obama did drink: the family were said to keep a well-stocked wine cellar at their home in Chicago.
President George W. Bush lost consciousness while watching American football on television in 2002 but this was caused by a pretzel on which he had choked.
He had stopped drinking at 40 after a “wild drunken weekend”, according to his wife Laura. President Bill Clinton did not drink much and while George HW. Bush is said to have ended the day with a dry martini, Ronald Reagan was another leader influenced by the sight of alcoholism in his childhood. He is said to have found his father once, passed out in the snow.
From this vantage point, the Carter White House no longer looks like an oddity; instead, after a season of hard-drinking presidents, notably Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, it may have signalled a tide on its way out.
The Times
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