U.S. Presidents and The Babe

In the wake of the 1919-20 Black Sox scandal, baseball got lucky. Luck’s name was George Herman Ruth, who entered our vernacular in a long-ball way and chose to never leave. The Babe helped baseball to start earning back its good name. What remains is the legend – a sunny-dark star, the extra-largest size of Everyman, with bumptious couth and whopping strength. In 1969, as Organized Baseball turned 100, “The baseball writers and broadcasters voted Babe Ruth “the Greatest Player Ever”’ – columnist George Vecsey wrote – “a title so Twentyish, so circus-posterish, that it was Ruthian in its sweep. The man even had an adjective in his honor.”1 The Babe knew six American presidents, dwarfing most and becoming “the first national superstar,” said George Will, “the man who gave us that category.”2

In a definition of irony, the man who denoted going deep arrived at Fenway Park in 1914 as only a part-time big-league outfielder, hitting .200 with a 2-1 pitching record. A year later, Babe won 18 games and smacked four homers – the American League leader had seven – and hit .315. In 1916 Ruth had nine shutouts, a 23-12 record, and a league-best 1.75 earned-run average. In one game he also got three hits, including a home run. The French statesman Charles M. de Talleyrand once chimed, “This is worse than a crime, it’s a blunder.”3 By the mid-’10s, millions thought it both that Babe didn’t daily bat.

Originally, the Red Sox weren’t among them, in 1912 using pitching, defense, and speed to win their first World Series of four in seven years. Next April, newly inaugurated President Woodrow Wilson saw the Senators play three games in Washington against the defending world titlist. That May 29, Wilson rode back to Griffith Stadium for another Red Sox game!4 On October 9, 1915, the president visited Baker Bowl for Game Two of the Red Sox-Philadelphia Phillies World Series with his fiancée, Edith Bolling Galt, a Southern widow and jeweler whom Wilson met after wife Ellen Axson died a year earlier. It marked their public coming-out – also the first president to attend a World Series. Boston won, 2-1, to even the fall classic.5

Ruth, 20, barely affected that Series, vainly pinch-hitting but clearly recalling his one time at-bat. In 1928 poet Carl Sandburg asked which of all the presidents was “the best model for boys to follow,” Ruth, a Democrat who had grown up largely at the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys in Baltimore, cast a vote for “Woodrow Wilson … always a great friend of mine.”6 Thin and ascetic, it would be hard to find someone less redolent of Babe. Like Ruth, though, Wilson’s DNA included balls and strikes. A page from his boyhood geometry notebook, titled “Base Ball Ground,”7 shows a hand-scribbled diagram of a baseball diamond. Wilson later became Davidson College’s varsity center fielder, scholar and educator, New Jersey governor, and 1913-21 president – the first chief executive Ruth met. (Others, according to historian Michael Beschloss, were Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and George H.W. Bush. Had Thomas E. Dewey not lost 1948’s stunning election to Truman, he would have been lucky 7.)8

“Every president wanted him to hit!” said Lee Allen, 1959-69 Hall of Fame librarian. “Fans wanted to see him hit.” At the time, “The Red Sox wanted him to do both.”9 In 1917 he won 24 games and hit .325. In 1918 new skipper Ed Barrow asked Babe if he would like mostly to play left field. He did, batting .300 with a war-curbed league-co-high 11 homers and 13-7 record. Next season pivoted the Red Sox, New York Yankees, and baseball. Ruth’s 29 home runs were only one less than the sum of the next three AL sluggers, breaking Ned Williamson’s all-time record of 27 in 1884.10 Babe led the league in RBIs and slugging percentage, homered in each ballpark, and hit a then-record four grand slams. Even nicknames blared carnival – to wit, Bam, The Bambino (also, Great Bambino), Behemoth of Bust, Caliph of Clout, Colossus of Clout. Goliath of the Grand Slam, Prince of Powders, Sultan of Swat, and Wizard of Whack.11 “Superstar,” indeed.

On December 26, 1919, Boston owner and financier Harry Frazee sold Babe to New York for $100,00012 that he then invested in would-be Broadway hits, including My Lady Friends – a farce, like the coming decade’s second-division Red Sox. It was the first in a series of deals and sales between the teams that helped New York win its first World Series title in 1923. Of the Yankees’ 25 players, 11 had belonged to Boston.13 The Red Sox won one flag in the next 47 years, often snatching defeat from victory. Meantime, in New York, even then baseball’s marquee, Ruth was the first US sports totem to twin his appeal to a presidential incumbent or candidate – “first who dealt with presidents as a celebrity of near-equal magnitude,” said Michael Beschloss.14 It could be hard to tell the star.

In the July 12, 1999, Sports Illustrated, Richard Hoffer dubbed Ruth “like rock-and-roll and the Model T … a seminal American invention. Be it his power at the plate, his popularity or his various appetites, the Babe was huge.”15 His first season as a Yankee, Ruth hit 54 homers, topping his old record by 25. That year, 1920, GOP pols wanted him to endorse presidential nominee Warren G. Harding against Democrat James A. Cox. “I’m a Democrat!” boomed Ruth, the party man, before asking how much they were offering. The answer “was … $4,000 in it for Babe and $1,000 for me,” New York writer Fred Lieb, trying to arrange the deal, wrote in his 1977 memoir, Baseball as I Have Known It.16 All Ruth had to do was to trek to Harding’s Marion, Ohio, home and publicly support him. Talks collapsed, said Lieb, when the Black Sox Scandal erupted, the candidate’s staff “cool[ing] off on the whole subject.”17

Even so, Harding won a landslide on November 2, 1920, bringing baseball DNA to the White House in every form. Born in 1865 in Corsica (now Blooming Grove), Ohio, he moved as a boy to Marion, playing pepper with future National League shortstop Bob Allen. In his 20s Harding owned part of Marion’s team, the Diggers, in the Ohio State League18 and became an ex-officio scout with a pronounced big-league eye. The Marion Star newspaper publisher found 1912-26 pitcher Wilbur Cooper, who forged a 216-178 record for Pittsburgh, Detroit, and National League Chicago. Harding’s other find was Brooklyn first baseman Jake Daubert, who twice led the NL with a .350 and .329 average.19 Perhaps the best-ever left-handed pitcher was even named in the then-president’s honor. Born in 1921, Warren Spahn had a 363-245 record and a sublime pickoff move. “Once he was said to have picked a runner off first base,” said 1950s Braves teammate Ernie Johnson – “and the batter swung.”20

Harding saw more games at the Senators’ Griffith Stadium than any other park – four21 — but something about the Yankees and New York drew him to the Babe. A decade earlier, the Yankees, outgrowing tiny Hilltop Park, had moved into the Giants’ double-decked Polo Grounds in a hollow below Coogan’s Bluff. In 1920 Ruth hit .376. Next year, the Yanks won their first flag. In 1922 furious, Jints owner Charles Stoneham raised their rent and in effect kicked the American Leaguers off Manhattan Isle. “They should move to some out-of-the-way place like Queens,” huffed Giants skipper John McGraw, presuming no one would ever hear from them again.22 That year, construction began on a three-deck shrine a quarter-mile from the Polo Grounds across the Harlem River.23 Lengths were pygmy to the poles (280 and 295 feet at left and right field, respectively) but gaping in the alleys (left-center field, 460 feet, and right-center, 429) and center field (490).24 Babe was the ultimate pull hitter – perfect for his park.

To Harding, like baseball, Yankee Stadium – a.k.a. The Stadium – straightaway became “The House That Ruth Built.” It was also built for the Babe. Like Ruth’s, Harding’s baseball was more intuitive than intellectual, the Ohioan growing up playing more than watching the local team. He knew about the hit and run, sacrifice bunt, and hitting ’em where they ain’t. He liked seeing pitcher Walter Johnson’s high, hard one, cheering a Honus Wagner triple, and urging us to “strive for production as Babe Ruth strives for home runs.”25 He enjoyed being near jocks, some of their habits being more than faintly similar. Ruth drank at any time available. Harding relished hosting him when the Yankees played in Washington – the teams met there 11 times a year – as much as he enjoyed tossing out the first ball at each Senators home opener. The president liked to inhale bourbon in the Oval Office even as he ardently defended Prohibition!26 His baseball grasp made any conversation about it caring. Yet, like Ruth he was careless about ethics, a fatal flaw.

Almost prophetically, in early 1923 Harding sold the Marion Star and wrote a new will. He brooked influenza, a heart condition worsened by stress. Six days after The Stadium opened, he traveled to New York, where on April 24 the baseball lifer told his pitcher, “Walter, I came out to root for Washington.” Yanks pitcher Sad Sam Jones then blanked the Senators, 4-0, Ruth homering, in the first shutout in the Big Ballpark in the Bronx.27 Babe and Harding are shown in a last photo together: the two faces of the National Game.28 Doubtless they discussed Ruth’s next visit to the White House, baseball talk flowing like Prohibition booze. Returning to the capital, Harding began a “voyage of understanding” to rival Franklin Roosevelt’s later tours in length and intensity. Speaking daily, he would entrain cross-country, go north to the Alaska Territory, turn south to California, pass through the Panama Canal to Puerto Rico, and return to Washington by the end of August.29

On July 26, in British Columbia, Harding became the first US president in office to visit Canada. The next day he spoke to 60,000 at the University of Washington, predicting statehood for Alaska. (It finally happened in 1959.) Weary, Harding “referred to Alaska as Nebraska, dropped his manuscript, and grasped the lectern to keep his balance.”30 He sped through the speech, not waiting for applause, then rushed to San Francisco, where doctors, thinking him better, let their patient sit up in bed. On August 2, wife Florence was apparently reading a magazine story to him. Suddenly her husband began to twist convulsively, then collapsed. His body soon lay in a casket in a cross-country train to DC for services, nine million lining the tracks, shocked by Harding’s death at 57 of “a stroke of cerebral apoplexy” – likely a heart attack.31 He was taken to Marion for burial, then among the most beloved presidents since Lincoln. Ruth penned a handwritten condolence note to Florence, calling himself “a personal friend” of Harding’s and thanking “his many kind acts toward individual players.”32

The day of the funeral, Johnson recalled the prior year when son Walter Jr. played in front of the dugout at Griffith Stadium. Harding nodded the boy over, put him on his lap where he sat for the first inning, and said, “This is a mighty fine boy you have here.”33 Thomas S. Rice, a Brooklyn Eagle baseball writer whose interview of the candidate in 1920 had delighted Harding more than any press session of the campaign, evoked how “[Harding] was the sort that gloomed and did not enjoy his supper at the White House if he had seen the Washington team lose. On the contrary, he felt it was a pretty good world, and things could soon come out all right in Europe or elsewhere, if he had seen the Senators win.”34 Unlike the Bambino’s Yankees, the Ohioan’s second-division team had not spoiled him with success.

Harding yielded to vice president Calvin Coolidge, described by Senators owner Clark Griffith as “a calculating, unexcitable man who showed nothing.”35 Worse, Coolidge knew almost nothing of baseball, yet possessed a politician’s sense of appropriation. Numerous photos show Calvin awkwardly posed, about to throw – where and how, he seemed uncertain. Coolidge could be legendarily terse – thus, his moniker, Silent Cal. A woman at a White House dinner gushed, “You must talk to me, Mr. Coolidge. I made a bet today that I could get more than two words out of you.” Cal told her: “You lose.”36 Reticence was one thing, frigidity another. How to humanize a man whose body temperature seemed single-digit? If the query troubled aides on the eve of the 1924 election, the answer crystalized as Washington streaked toward an unlikely first flag – tether Coolidge to baseball, then in full flush of popularity. Use it to elect him.37

In late September the Senators returned from a pennant-clinching victory, took a motorcade from Union Station to the White House, and traipsed to the Ellipse, where Lincoln played town ball in the 1860s.38 There, Cal gave a rousing talk – the kind of speech he had rarely given and after 1924 rarely gave again. “They are a great band, these armored knights of the bat and ball,”39 Coolidge began, the crowd amazed. Who was this suddenly glib and baseball-savvy man? In fact, aiding these and other talks was wife Grace, a former official scorer of her baseball team at the University of Vermont, who knew, unlike Cal, the difference between a Texas Leaguer and a Baltimore Chop. Coolidge adjourned the rally, cheered Washington’s only Series title, and rode baseball to a November landslide. He then returned to caring little about it, taking his most telling conversation to the grave. Earlier that year, players of the visiting Yankees had formed a straight line to greet him. At last the Behemoth of Biff came face-to-face with Coolidge. “Mr. Ruth,” said the president. Babe wiped his head with a handkerchief and answered, “Hot as hell, ain’t it, Prez?”40

In 1928 Coolidge declined to seek re-election. Herbert Hoover succeeded him, having played the game since boyhood and for Stanford’s freshman team in 1893, challenging the “San Francisco professional team to play us on campus.” He continued: “When the score was something like thirty to nothing at the end of the fifth inning and getting dark, we called it off. In time, my colleagues decided I would make a better manager than shortstop,”41 having dislocated a finger. Hoover took a job promoting Stanford baseball and football as a student in a post now known as “business manager,” which helped the prototypal poor boy who made good – born in an Iowa small town, orphaned at age three, and raised by various aunts and uncles – pay his way through college.

Later a.k.a. the Great Humanitarian, Hoover made a fortune in engineering but left in World War I to head the Commission for Belgian Relief and oversee America’s wartime food supply. He returned home to become the 1921-29 secretary of commerce, heading flood recovery in 1920s Mississippi. He backed boys’ baseball leagues on every level, tossed out the first pitch at an American Legion title game, and signed and gave dozens of baseballs for use as awards to players.42 A photo shows Hoover opening Washington’s sandlot baseball season by throwing out the first ball.43 “The rigid volunteer rules of right and wrong in sports,” he said, “are second only to religious faith in moral training – and baseball is the greatest of American sports.” Before their 1970 move to Riverfront Stadium, the Cincinnati Reds displayed his quote on a tablet at Crosley Field.44

On one hand, Hoover admired Babe’s weaving ’20s magic at the bat. “He was a parade all by himself, a burst of dazzle and jingle,” Jimmy Cannon wrote, “Santa Claus drinking his whiskey straight and groaning with a bellyache.”45 On the other, Ruth’s appetites revolted the pious president to-be: suspended five times, in 1922; again in 1925, for insubordination; overeating [i.e., gonorrhea] that year causing “the stomachache heard ’round the world”: the cynosure of all eyes. In 1926 Ruth meant the tying Series run, St. Louis ahead, 3-2, in Game Seven’s final frame. A Yankees rally died, Babe out stealing. The next two years, New York won the Classic – truly “Murderers’ Row.” In Buffalo, Ruth wrestled kids on the field. In Ossining, New York, the convicts team named the Black Sheep played the Yanks in exhibitions at Sing Sing prison, “legend [having] it that Babe hit his longest” blast.46 On September 30, 1927, he smacked AL homer number 60. Hoover inhaled daily box scores, selective coverage then less cynical than today. Once Bombers pitcher Waite Hoyt drank so much that he entered a hospital to dry out. Papers explained it by dubbing Waite an amnesiac, Babe telegramming his critique: “Read about your case of amnesia. Must be a new brand.”47

That August 2, a note on the White House press board affirmed Coolidge’s decision “not … to run for re-election in nineteen twenty-eight.”48 By now, Hoover was so popular that many Democrats wanted to draft him for president. Instead he became 1928 GOP nominee. Hoover was rural, small town, and Protestant. Democrats chose New York Governor Alfred E. Smith – urban, boss-linked, and Catholic. One day, the Bombers’ regular lineup, pitcher Waite Hoyt, and batboy posed for a photo, each carrying a bat with a letter attached. Collectively, they read “For Al Smith.”49 The picture made many papers, an outlier saying that Ruth favored Hoover. This fried the Babe, who made another photo wearing a suit, top hat, and sign reading, “I’m for Al Smith.” A few days later at Griffith, Ruth further refused to pose with a photo of the president. “Nothing doing,” he reportedly said, repeating support for Smith.50 A verbal melee then ensued. ruth refuses to pose for hoover! papers screamed, some vowing to cancel his syndicated column. Later, wrote Michael Beschloss, Babe called the dispute a “misunderstanding” and said posing with Hoover would be an “honor.”51 Soon a picture of the principals surfaced: an armistice, albeit brief.

That October 9, the Yankees won their third Series in six years, beating the Cardinals, 7-3. En route home from St. Louis, Ruth spoke approvingly in Terre Haute, Indiana, from a train, about Smith, whereupon the crowd turned silent.52 According to Leigh Montville’s 2006 biography, The Big Bam, Ruth replied, “The hell with you!”53 Like Smith, Babe was Catholic – to Ruth, the candidate’s origins on New York’s Lower East Side redolent of his own. “I wasn’t fed with a gold spoon when I was a kid,” he wrote a Smith campaign official, one Franklin D. Roosevelt. “No poor boy can go any too high in this world to suit me.”54 In a national radio speech, the Bambino declared “what a wonderful thing it is” that “there is a chance for every boy to get to the top in America.”55 Nothing kept Hoover from winning an Election Day avalanche: 40 states to Smith’s 8, including Al’s New York. For Ruth, living well was not solely his best revenge. After the Depression roof fell in, a reporter questioned the propriety of George Herman’s $80,000 salary topping Hoover’s $75,000 in 1930. “I know,” Babe famously said, “but I had a better year than Hoover.”56

Despite such contempt, Hoover respected Ruth’s batting oomph, even as the 1929-31 sans-pennant Yanks marked their driest patch between 1921 and 1964. “I want more runs in baseball,” Hoover often said, foretelling FDR. “When you were raised on a sandlot, where the scores ran twenty-three to sixty-one, you yearn for something more than a five to two score.” Excitement spiked “when there is someone on base. It reaches ecstasy when somebody makes a run.”57 How could he not respect a player who 12 times led the AL in going deep or 72 times homered twice in a game – and whose drama peaked as Hoover was about to leave office and Roosevelt was to inherit it? In 1930 New York had dealt popular Mark Koenig to Detroit, which sent him to the Cubs, for whom he hit .353 in 1932 and helped win a pennant. Chicago then denied Koenig a full World Series share, inflaming that year’s foe, Koenig’s ex-teammate Yanks. The Bombers won the Series’ first two games. Before Game Three, Yanks skipper Joe McCarthy and Cubs manager Charlie Grimm posed with FDR, who threw out the first pitch. In the fifth inning, the score tied, 4-4 at Wrigley, starter Charlie Root faced Ruth.

The Cubs righty threw a strike, then ball. The Yankees bayed “Cheapskates,” the home dugout responding “Flatfoot” and tossing liniment. Root threw ball two. Babe raised two fingers: a 2-and-2 count. Did he gesture to predict where the next pitch would land? “Ruth most certainly did not call his home run in that game,” Root maintained. “I ought to know. I was there.”58 According to the Yanks’ Frank Crosetti, Babe pointed to the Cubs dugout, not the bleachers. “Those Cubs were a bunch of stooges,” he said. “They were riding Ruth from the bench.”59 After the game, Babe told Crosetti, “If the writers want to think that I pointed where I was going to hit the ball, let ’em.”60 In 1994 Fox TV ran an exposé of the Called Shot. “I asked [his 1956-57 pitching coach Root] if Ruth had called his homer,” Braves pitcher Ernie Johnson said. “His eyes narrowed and he said, ‘If he [Ruth] had, next time up I’d have stuck the pitch right in his ear.”61 Now-Braves skipper Grimm, agreed, telling Ernie, “Boy, Root was mean out there. One time he knocked down three or four guys in a row.”62 None thought Ruth pointed to the seats – a conclusion Fox TV reached, too.

Elected in 1932, taking 42 states to Hoover’s 6, Franklin Roosevelt hosted a 1933 reception at the White House, flinging an arm around Ruth’s shoulders in mock complaint about a rarity: being one-upped in public. In 1920, running for vice president, FDR had been speaking in a hotel lobby when Babe, entering, stole a good part of his audience.63 Before contracting polio, Roosevelt had played baseball eagerly, if not well, as a boy. Later, he became team manager in prep school. As president, he “enjoys himself at a ballgame as much as a kid on Christmas morning,” wrote Baseball Magazine,64 the “kind of fan who ‘wants to get plenty of action for my money.” FDR admitted to getting “the biggest kick out of the biggest score – a game in which the hitters poke the ball into the far corners of the field, the outfielders scramble, and men run the bases.”65 A May 7, 1933, Fireside Chat showed FDR’s baseball state of mind. “I have no expectation of making a hit every time I come to bat,” he said. “What I seek is the highest possible batting average, not only for myself but for the team.”66

Roosevelt compared a batter sacrificing for the team’s good to a citizen sacrificing for the nation’s good. Like a play-by-play man, he prized education, interspersing facts and yarns. On May 24, 1935, FDR threw a White House switch to light the first official big-league night game, Dodgers and Reds from Cincinnati’s Crosley Field. Ironically, in a game there four days later, Babe “had a lot of difficulty with the left-field terrace,” the Dayton Daily News wrote, “and once fell down while going after a ball.”67 Leaving the game, Babe soon retired. In 1939 he attended the formal opening of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, two years before America entered World War II. After Pearl Harbor, Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis wrote Roosevelt a January 14, 1942, letter, saying, “If you believe we ought to close down for the duration of the war, we are ready to do so immediately. If you feel we ought to continue, we would be delighted to do so. We wait your order.”68 A day later, FDR read his reply aloud at a White House press conference, saying the national pastime was vital to the national interest. “I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going.”69

It is impossible to know baseball’s fate had Roosevelt not acted. It survived and thrived because he did. Baseball remained, as FDR foresaw, “a recreation … which can be got for very little cost.”70 Towns formed local teams, gasoline and rubber rationing keeping almost every family close to home. In 1943 broadcaster Mel Allen, serving in the Army, accompanied Ruth to events in the Tri-State New York-Connecticut-New Jersey area. A guest is said to need no introduction. That was literally true of Babe, Allen said. “I’m sitting in his Cadillac or hearing him speak at fundraisers [for the USO, American Red Cross, and other service groups] and he’s speaking in his outgoing personality like he knew me and his audience for years.”71 It was, Mel mused, “like talking to God.” Military personnel played “pickup” games. Ruth threw out the first ball. More night matches were slated as FDR had asked so that “the day shift … [could] see a game occasionally.”72 Babe joined Herbert Hoover, among others, to raise money at World War II events for America’s allies, including a 1940 Baseball Writers Association of America fundraiser for the Finnish Relief Fund.73 The war made old rivalries seem petty.

In 1944 Ruth endorsed likely history’s most famed Might-Have-Been-President. In October, having been asked to again support FDR, he surprisingly said that America needed “a new pitcher in the White House.” America’s only three-term (soon four) president was “a great man,” Babe told reporters, registering to vote for the first time, “but we have got to have a change.”74 The man Babe had in mind was Governor Thomas E. Dewey, elected New York’s governor in 1942, since then having “done a good job” in Albany.75 On Election Eve, he and baseball’s still-most-titanic name anchored a rally at Madison Square Garden, Ruth saying, “Some people put script in front of some people to say what they want them to say, but I don’t have to do that.”76 Dewey lost, but easily ran FDR the closest of his four presidential primary races. In 1948, heavily favored, the New Yorker lost America’s still most luminous political upset to Truman. Years later, I separately asked former Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and George H.W. Bush which person of their lifetime who did not become president should have. Each chose Dewey.77

In 1947 Dewey took both of his sons to the Subway Series between the Yankees and Dodgers.78 That year the last president whom the Bambino met led his team to the first collegiate World Series. By then, George H.W. Bush, only 23, had served heroically in World War II, almost lost his life when his plane was shot down over the Pacific, been honorably discharged after 58 combat missions, and enrolled at Yale University, where he had been accepted prior to prewar training.79 The young man in a hurry began its accelerated academic program and built a résumé of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity; member, Phi Beta Kappa and secret society Skull and Bones; and Yale baseball captain. His yearbook shows Bush, in uniform, with a description: “Captain of championship college baseball team [making the first two (1947-48) College World Series final], while completing college in 2½ years after war service. Phi Beta Kappa – Economics.”80

The Baseball Quarterly Reviews (BQR), published by the Collegiate Record, compiled statistics on its famed – “infamous,” Bush laughed – no-hit, good-field first baseman.81 It found his batting average lower than previously thought (.224 v. .251 listed in 1991 USA Today’s Baseball Weekly) but his fielding percentage even higher (.983, including a remarkable .993 in Bush’s senior year). “He was the only [Yale] man to start every game [76] in that 1946-48 [Yale varsity] period and the only Eli player to achieve that ‘iron man’ distinction,” BQR wrote.82 If Lou Gehrig was baseball’s “Iron Man,” Bush was Yale’s. Video shows him in his 60s making a diving stop of a groundball behind first base and making a dazzling putout at the bag. Aptly, his hero was the Bambino’s teammate: “Gehrig was steadier, less flamboyant, and more dependable than the Babe,” he said, “steadily achieving excellence”83 – a telling self-portrait.

In June 1948 the New York Times recorded Ruth, 53, traveling to New Haven to donate his black-bound manuscript of The Babe Ruth Story to the Yale Library, a month before the ill-advised film version, starring William Bendix, was scheduled for release. In a ceremony at Yale Field, Babe gave the book to Yale’s captain, whom the Times termed “George (Poppy) Bush of Greenwich, [Connecticut].”84 Some wept. Ruth unsteadily held a cigar stub. At the microphone, a shell of his former 240 pounds, voice spent, Ruth addressed “Captain Bush,” saying that his book “has a lot of fun in it, and a lot of laughs, a lot of crying, too.”85 In 1987 Bush wrote his own memoir, Looking Forward. “It was obvious that he was dying of cancer [death came August 16],” the future president wrote, “but some of the young, free-spirited ‘Babe’ was still there, very much alive. ‘You know,’ he said, winking, ‘when you write a book like this, you can’t put everything in it.’”86

Ruth played at Griffith Stadium before five US presidents: Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, and FDR. In a sense, he still plays at Cooperstown – a pilgrim to the Hall of Fame struck by the heavy traffic that surrounds Babe’s plaque, among the most visited of the more than 300 players, managers, executives, and other honorees. Like vines around baseball’s trellis, Ruth intersected even with future presidents he didn’t know. In the 1940s, Richard Nixon entered a New York restaurant to ask Babe for an autograph. The Yankees’ number 3, of course, complied.87 His lesson wasn’t lost. Later, pre- and post-presidency, Nixon usually spurned luxury boxes for a box seat, sitting among fans, keeping score and signing autographs, saying, “If Ruth can sign, I can sign.”88 Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, embraced the Babe as vice president in early 1974 as Henry Aaron neared, then tied, Ruth’s career home-run record. Hank’s first 1974 swing on Opening Day at Cincinnati equaled Babe’s Everest 714, Ford cheering lustily, “glad to have been part of history.”89

Then, on April 8, another president-to-be eyed history at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. In the fourth inning, Aaron batted. “Sitting on 714. Here’s the pitch by [Al] Downing … swinging … There’s a drive into left-center field!” said Braves voice Milo Hamilton. “That ball is gonna be … outa here! It’s gone! It’s 715!” clearing the fence into reliever Tom House’s glove. “There’s a new home-run champion of all time! And it’s Henry Aaron! The fireworks are going! Henry Aaron’s coming around third! His teammates are at home plate! Listen to this crowd!”90 The game was halted to honor Aaron. Then-Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter gave number 44 a special auto tag, HR-715, car to follow.91

Strikingly, in a cycle that fused the presidency and baseball, Carter’s mother, the beloved Miss Lillian, wrote of never “forget[ting] the experience of seeing Babe Ruth hit two homers in a single game at Yankee Stadium.”92 Each year, when Jimmy was growing up and the family peanut crop was harvested, his parents “would drive ‘up north’ to spend a week or ten days almost totally immersed in major league baseball,” he wrote in Sharing Good Times.93 One year the Carters stayed in Boston for an entire Braves homestand; the next, Washington, to see the Senators; another, New York, the Yankees, in The House That Ruth Built,94 his thread linking one generation to the next.

In 1998 Babe reemerged in daily conversation as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa staged a homerthon that even a later revelation of drug use did not erase. Their Great Race against Ruth’s – and Roger Maris’s later – single-season mark of 60 and 61 home runs in 154 and 162 games, respectively, spectacularly revived the game. It also renewed an American Original whose legacy astonishes – as Ruthian as any campaign speech and as bipartisan as any prayer.

CURT SMITH’s essay on Babe Ruth and U.S. presidents links two subjects that since boyhood have gripped his heart—baseball and politics. As speechwriter to George H.W. Bush, he wrote more addresses than anyone else for the 41st president in his 1989-93 term and beyond, including Bush’s “Just War” speech, address on the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor at the USS Arizona memorial site in 1991, and eulogy to Ronald Reagan in 2004. Smith also frequently spoke to another baseball-loving president, Richard Nixon, who had been offered the post of commissioner in 1965. Born and raised in Upstate New York, Smith grew up a Yankees fan, idolizing Ruth, Maris, and Mantle. In the 1960s, the then-teen and future author of 17 books, most recently The Presidents and the Pastime, Gate House Media Columnist, and Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Rochester saw the light, becoming a fan of Babe’s first team, the Red Sox. He still enjoys trips to his mother’s native home, Worcester, Massachusetts, every other sentence asking, “How about those Sawx?”

Sources

I wish to especially thank the former American presidents for the views expressed in this chapter. Grateful appreciation is also made to reprint all play-by-play and color radio text courtesy of John Miley’s The Miley Collection. In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, most particularly the Society for American Baseball Research, the author also consulted: Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites’ box scores, player, season, and team pages, batting and pitching logs, and other material relevant to this history. FansGraphs.com provided statistical information. In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also consulted:

Books

Ambrose, Stephen E. Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).

Benson, Michael. Ballparks of North America: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia of Baseball Grounds, Yards and Stadiums, 1845 to 1988 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1989).

Bush, George. All the Bush, George Bush: My Life in Letters (New York: Scribner, 1999).

Cassuto, Leonard, and Stephen Partridge, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Baseball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Creamer, Robert W. Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).

Manchester, William. One Brief Shining Moment (Boston: Little, Brown, 1983).

Morgan, Ted. FDR: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986).

Rickey, Branch, and Robert Riger. The American Diamond (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965).

Ruth, George Herman, with Bob Considine: The Babe Ruth Story (New York: Dutton, 1948).

Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The People’s Game (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Newspapers

The New York Times and the Washington Post have been a primary source about information about Babe Ruth and the US presidents who knew him. Other key sources include Associated Press, Baseball Digest, SportsBusiness Daily, the Boston Globe, The Sporting News, and the Times of London.

Magazines/Periodicals

Sports Illustrated, The Baseball Quarterly Reviews, and The Saturday Evening Post.

Interviews

Lee Allen, with author, June 1967.

Mel Allen, with author, February 1972.

George H.W. Bush, with author, June 2010.

Gerald Ford, with author, May 1994.

Ernie Johnson, with author, May 1986.

Richard Nixon, with author, September 1979.

George Will, with author, April 1989.