Word: buchananism
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...avowed that his salvos have had only tacit, after-the-fact approval from the White House. This one had its genesis in Richard Nixon's office on the morn ing after his Viet Nam speech, when the President read the news summary edited for him by Speechwriter Pat Buchanan-and concluded that the TV commentators had chopped him up. "There was fairly widespread dismay and unhappiness around here," says one White House aide wryly. The incoming mail showed that some of the President's supporters were just as upset, so Nixon sent Agnew into the breach...
...James Buchanan called the presidency "a crown of thorns," and Herbert Hoover pronounced it "a hair shirt." Lyndon Johnson spoke in sepulchral tones of "the awesome burden." There is an article of faith, enshrined in the national mythology, that the leader of the most powerful country on earth must hold the world's most onerous and agonizing job. Knowing how hard the President is working not only reassures Americans, it inspires some in a small way to carry on their own more or less demanding tasks...
Historians sometimes divide the Presidents into three categories under the names of the three archetypical Chief Executives. James Buchanan, Lincoln's predecessor, was the formalist who administered but did not lead the country. Lincoln was the heroic leader whose stewardship was passionate, argumentative and highly political. Grover Cleveland was a mixture of the two, not moving forward at a rapid rate, but not stepping very far backward either, expending just enough energy, in Hyman's words, "to maintain the existing kinetic equilibrium...
Following Cleveland. The new President will not follow Buchanan; he is too energetic and committed for that. At the same time, he seems temperamentally incapable of the high-key style of a Lincoln or a Franklin Roosevelt, whose presidency, as Historian Clinton Rossiter notes, was characterized by "his airy eagerness to meet the age head-on." Instead, Nixon seems to view his office much as Cleveland did, and will probably work to push the country in the direction that he thinks it ought to go-with his foot poised between the brake and the accelerator...
Your misleading statement, which would include as Wasps such Presidents as Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James Knox Polk, James Buchanan, Rutherford B. Hayes, William McKinley and Woodrow Wilson, stuns my Celtic image. They were Celts...