No one (well, maybe one person) runs for president without accepting the inevitability that they’ll be accused of ugly things. It’s almost impossible for a president to sue for libel or slander, not just because of their status as the ultimate public figure but also because of the sheer range of sordid activities we now know various presidents have been implicated in, from slavery to targeted assassinations to whatever Franklin Pierce probably did. In a few cases, however, fiction has given writers the license to accuse presidents of things they (as far as we know) never actually did. On the heels of an off-year election, here are five of those transgressions.
(5) Ronald Reagan accidentally makes a man’s moral crisis worse
(Fargo)
This is one of the less egregious transgressions on our list but we’re including it because it’s such a perfect fictional summary of how the real 40th president’s shallow, glib outlook flattened every nuanced or complex question and, more importantly, because Bruce Campbell as the Gipper is such flawless casting.
In the second season of the surreal anthology crime series inspired by the Coens’ 1996 film, our hero, Minnesota State Trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson), is assigned as the presidential candidate’s security detail during a 1979 campaign stop. Solverson seeks counsel from the former California governor on his sense that there is no moral order to the world and that perhaps good can’t triumph over evil. Reagan responds with rambling platitudes, and concludes “there’s not a challenge on God’s Earth that can’t be overcome by an American,” but can’t explain how exactly, leaving Lou more adrift than when he first asked. He never appears again in the season, with his single scene mostly serving to illustrate how any easy answers would require Lou to dumb himself down in a way he can’t do.
(4) George H.W. Bush has a feud with his new neighbors that escalates to a physical brawl
(The Simpsons)
President Bush the Elder was president when the seemingly immortal animated sitcom premiered and had an uneasy relationship with it, at one point calling for an American family unit “more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons.” While that seems impossibly gentle by the standards of modern presidential media criticism, the show’s writers held a grudge as only writers can. A Simpsonized Bush popped up while his real-life counterpart was still president, but it wasn’t until the 1996 episode “Two Bad Neighbors” that the now-ex-president got his own episode (voiced by Harry Shearer rather than the genuine article, obviously).
The episode begins as a “Dennis the Menace” pastiche, with George and Barbara moving in next door to the Simpsons and George growing increasingly incensed with Bart inviting himself over. But when Poppy takes executive action and spanks Bart for misbehaving, things become personal for Homer, who escalates things to a prank war for which Bush is wholly unprepared (his counteroffensive is to hang a banner reading “TWO BAD NEIGHBORS,” which just confuses onlookers about who he’s referring to).
The feud comes to a head in an all-out brawl, with Bush utilizing some of his CIA training to fight dirty, but the fight is cut short by the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev, bearing housewarming gifts and shocked to see a man of Bush’s stature reduced to “grappling with local oaf.” Things work out much better for Homer, who soon gains a new neighbor in the kindred spirit Gerald Ford.
(3) Bill Clinton gets Peter Griffin high and seduces his wife
(Family Guy)
Bill Clinton and 1990s popular culture are something of a chicken-or-egg situation. Did it take the era of lowbrow, FCC-baiting humor for a charming, philandering scoundrel to win Americans over, or did he help calcify that culture? Whatever the answer, one of his (fictional) low points came after he’d left office, on a show that, just like him, faded from view at the turn of the century but made a triumphal return soon after.
In the 2007 episode “Bill & Peter’s Bogus Journey,” the former president appears in the fictional Rhode Island town of Quahog to help lift Peter out of his midlife crisis. However, their hijinks take a darker turn when the two share a joint and steal a local farmer’s pig, prompting Peter’s wife Lois to attempt to intervene but, like so many others, end up in bed with the former president. The incident drives a wedge between the couple that is naturally resolved by the half-hour mark, but Peter’s attempt to break off his friendship with Clinton also ends in a romantic encounter. “Wow. You are good,” Peter remarks.
(2) Richard Nixon runs an evil shadow government and commits suicide to escape justice (Marvel Comics)
The Watergate scandal shattered Americans’ faith in their institutions, and the resulting paranoia and cynicism pervade classic movies of the time like “The Parallax View” and “3 Days of the Condor.” But film wasn’t the only medium affected by the headlines, with the fallout trickling down to one of our most escapist art forms, and in the pages of “Captain America,” no less.
In 1974, in a storyline written by Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema, the star-spangled hero finds himself the target of a media campaign by the “Committee to Restore America’s Principles,” an obvious riff on Nixon’s dirty-tricks outfit the Committee to Re-elect the President. Cap and his ally the Falcon discover the group’s origins lie with a nefarious organization with Klan-esque aesthetics called the Secret Empire. Their leader is ultimately unmasked by Cap, who reacts with horror–while we never see the man’s face, the scene takes place in the Oval Office, so it’s not rocket science what Englehart and Buscema were going for.
“High political office didn’t satisfy me! My power was still too constrained by legalities!” the archfiend explains, before turning his gun on himself.
Exactly four decades later, the storyline, and the paranoid thrillers of the same era, were a clear influence on the 2014 film “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which reveals that the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s spy agency SHIELD has been taken over from the inside by the Nazi remnant organization Hydra–and, in what’s likely a deliberate homage, their leader is played by Hollywood’s Bob Woodward himself, Robert Redford.
(1) George Washington eats human flesh
(“The Washingtonians” by Bentley Little)
Our first president is rarely, if ever, included in the roundup of presidents who diminish the institution and the country; even recent reappraisals that note his status as a slaveholder rarely classify him as uniquely evil among chief executives. Not so for Bentley Little’s blackly comic 1992 short story, in which a modern-day man finds a colonial-era note reading “I will skin your children and eat them. Upon finishing, I shall fashion utensils out of their bones.” Upon authenticating the document learns the horrific truth: that the father of our country was a cannibal, forced to eat the bodies of the dead during the winter of Valley Forge and enjoying the taste so much he committed to it, dreaming of a “cannibal republic.”
The discovery of the note arouses the eponymous Washingtonians, a secret society that guards the secret and, naturally, practice cannibalism themselves.
It’s a scary yarn on its own, but also razor-sharp commentary on human defensiveness about our national and cultural heroes, particularly when we’re confronted with evidence of their flaws. As inspiration, Little has cited the American public’s ready acceptance of the Pentagon’s version of events during the Gulf War and how easily they might accept history in the same form, but in an era where parents demand their children not be taught about historical atrocities, the story feels more resonant than ever. The story was adapted, largely faithfully, in 2007 by Peter Medak for the anthology series “Masters of Horror.”
