You cannot judge presidents by the movies they watch, but you can judge them by the movies they watch again and again. Take Bill Clinton. What does it tell us that he screened High Noon more than 20 times in the White House?
Think of Bill during the impeachment, sad and alone—Hillary’s voice echoing down halls where Lincoln battled depression and Truman saw the ghost of Chester Arthur—watching Will Kane (Gary Cooper) step into the deserted streets of Hadleyville to face the guns of the Frank Miller gang alone. Because the sheriff had been forsaken. Because he’d played his historical role and was no longer wanted. Because, as the surf gurus say, “When you ride the big waves, you’re always alone.”
“I liked it because it wasn’t your standard macho Western,” Clinton told Harvey Weinstein(!) on CNN in 2012. “Gary Cooper was scared to death, all alone—he did the right thing anyway.”
It tells us that Bill Clinton was filled with self-pity during the era of Newt Gingrich and Ken Starr, that he believed himself a leader betrayed, a politician who, for the first time, had seen the people as they really were: fair-weather cowards.
You can learn a lot about your leaders, how they see themselves and the world, from the movies they call favorites—a good thing to remember going into a presidential-election year.
Woodrow Wilson was the first commander in chief to screen a movie in the White House. In 1915, less than a year after being sworn in, he gathered with members of his Cabinet to watch D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, the first real movie and a pure expression of America’s deep fear of its Black citizenry. (The nation being born in the movie is the Ku Klux Klan.) This makes sense. Wilson was a child of the South with memories of the Civil War. He’d rooted for the Confederacy as other kids root for the Cubs. Our first modern president was a racist, and his favorite movie, the first Hollywood blockbuster, was a racist screed whose subject was itself racism.
But there is the message, then there is the medium. With the arrival of the motion picture—think of Wilson lost in a filmic trance, hypnotized by shadows—came a new kind of mind. Gone were the long speeches and debates; gone were the position papers. Birth of a Nation, though stained by the old, bad thing, marked the arrival of the 20th-century politician. From here on in, image would be king. From here on in, it would be nothing but pictures. As Wilson himself supposedly said of the movie, “It’s like writing history with lightning.”
We did not get a truly film-besotted leader until the election of F.D.R., in 1932. Maybe it was his infirmity. In a movie house, the Olympic hurdler is no different than the man in the wheelchair. Roosevelt built the White House movie theater, and it’s where presidents watch movies to this day—a 42-seat jewel box in what had been the cloakroom. Nineteen forty-two was the year of Random Harvest and Yankee Doodle Dandy. But perhaps because he was over-scheduled—the Nazis occupied most of Europe; the Japanese were cutting a swath through the Pacific—F.D.R. favored shorts and cartoons, especially Mickey Mouse.
Our first modern president was a racist, and his favorite movie, the first Hollywood blockbuster, was a racist screed.
What does that tell you about the man who built the coalitions and created the agencies that still define our lives? That he liked to laugh? That he was as modern as Obama? That he was a personification of the national spirit? The atomic bomb and Walt Disney—ain’t that America!
Harry Truman had better taste in movies than Roosevelt. F.D.R. had the boarding-school, Ivy League, and East Coast pedigree, but the man from Independence, Missouri, knew cinematic art. While Woodrow Wilson bought into the worst of American mythology—night riders protecting the honor of white women—Truman, judging by his favorite movie, My Darling Clementine, believed in the best.
My Darling Clementine is John Ford’s take on the Wyatt Earp story, which had been told and retold by the time Truman saw it in December 1946. Henry Fonda is the reluctant marshal in this version, falling into the office of sheriff—he’d been on his way to California when held up in Tombstone, Arizona, in the same unexpected way Truman fell into the presidency. Earp first resists, then takes the safety of the people as his responsibility, which means dealing in death and shouldering the sin that inevitably follows. Truman had to make the same sort of decision before dropping the atomic bomb on Japan. It was a question of the greater good. It saved American lives. It had to be done.
Dwight Eisenhower grew up in the same sort of farm town as Truman, roughly 100 miles west. In a split screen, you’d see 13-year-old Harry hoeing the golden Missouri wheat while 17-year-old Dwight milks a cow in red-barn Kansas. Which is why they didn’t get along. Michael Jordan and Isaiah Thomas. Mick Jagger and Steven Tyler. Rivalry—the tyranny of small differences. Whereas Truman, a bank clerk and haberdasher, a perfect example of the petite bourgeoisie, saw himself in Wyatt Earp, who went into the big shootout surrounded by allies, Eisenhower, the five-star general who commanded the Allies, saw himself in High Noon’s Will Kane, a man forced to face the world’s evil alone. As with Clinton: a president who has fallen under the sway of High Noon is a president who is feeling sorry for himself.
What about Ike’s successor, J.F.K.? With Kennedy we get the first TV-ready president, the first president who went around without a hat, the first 20th-century president with great hair. Privileged, entitled, confident, happy. He did not only not feel sorry for himself—he felt great! That’s what Nixon hated: Jack was all self-admiration; Dick was all self-loathing, scarred by it as others are scarred by acne. Nixon was Uriah Heep, Kennedy was … James Bond!
He came by this love of 007 via Casino Royale, Ian Fleming’s first Bond novel, which J.F.K. read when he was just a senator with a bad back. He consumed Fleming right up to the moment he was assassinated, at which point he basically became a character in a Cold War thriller. Kennedy lived long enough to see only one of the movies, Dr. No, which he screened a few months before he took that bad ride in Dallas in 1963.
If Dr. No was J.F.K.’s favorite, perhaps it was because he was a fun-loving, gadget-crazed, licentious, future-oriented American man, a rich kid in search of easy solutions: one man, one mission, and the Russians take their missiles out of Cuba. After seeing the movie, J.F.K. supposedly said, “I wish I had James Bond on my staff.”
The atomic bomb and Walt Disney—ain’t that America!
James Bond is a fun and sinless vision of the world. That’s one of the reasons it was so tough for Americans to transition from the 007-loving J.F.K. to the gawky Texan, Lyndon Johnson, who called The Searchers a favorite film. John Ford again, 10 years down the line from Wyatt Earp, lost in the muck of America’s racial swamp.
A Texas origin story, The Searchers follows Ethan Edwards (John Wayne), a Civil War veteran who’s out chasing rustlers when his brother’s ranch is raided by the Comanche. They massacre the adults and take the youngest child, Debbie (Natalie Wood), to raise as their own. Ethan goes in search of his niece, a journey that spans seasons, until those seasons become years. It’s not love that drives Ethan, but a mad racist intensity. He intends to kill his niece, not save her, for the same reason he kills buffalo—so the Comanche can’t have them.
Lyndon Johnson, alone in the little theater, long legs stretched out, thinking of the Vietcong as Ethan Edwards explains why he knows he’ll eventually find Debbie (“An Injun will chase a thing ’til he thinks he’s chased it enough. Then he quits. Same when he runs. Seems he never learns there’s such a thing as a critter that might just keep comin’ on. So we’ll find them in the end, I promise you that. We’ll find ’em. Just as sure as the turning of the earth”)—it’s one of the most haunting images in presidential history.
The Searchers is a fever dream, a racial nightmare. It’s about sin and atonement, and the fact that it was an L.B.J. favorite tells you that he was haunted, that he was deep, and that he understood his nation, which is why, rough and ragged and hated as he became, Johnson was able to advance Civil Rights in ways the 007-loving Kennedy never could.
You can probably guess Nixon’s favorite movie. No, not Funny Girl. Patton! George C. Scott as the general slapping the shell-shocked (“Your nerves? Why, hell, you’re just a goddamned coward!”) and driving the Third Army across Europe (“We’re going to go through [the Germans] like crap through a goose!”). Nixon watched it again and again, a sweaty president nodding along to the famous lines. (“We’re not just going to shoot the bastards; we’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.”)
Nothing haunted here. Patton is a fantasy of strength. Some believe Nixon’s decision to escalate the Vietnam War by sending soldiers into Cambodia in 1969 was inspired by the movie. “I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country,” says the general. “He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”
Nixon gave way to Gerald Ford—he did not much like movies, which makes him an anomaly and, perhaps not un-coincidentally, the only unelected president on our list. He gave way to Jimmy Carter, who watched more films in the White House than any other commander in chief, averaging 2.5 a week. Like many cinephiles, Carter refused to name a favorite, instead citing a handful of films characteristic of the era, including Midnight Cowboy—maybe Carter identified with Joe Buck, the towheaded yokel turned into a prostitute by the city—and All the President’s Men, which would be Carter laughing at Nixon.
Ronald Reagan was a nut for Tom Clancy—books as well as movies—and actually recommended Red Storm Rising to Margaret Thatcher on the eve of the Reykjavík summit. Beyond that, he liked classics—he watched It’s a Wonderful Life at Camp David. He did not watch as many movies as Carter or Eisenhower but did not need to: he was living a movie, his presidency being the last great role—he actually described his tenure in office this way—in an acting career that began with his 1937 appearance in Love Is in the Air.
For George H. W. Bush it was Viva Zapata!, a 1952 Western directed by Elia Kazan and starring Marlon Brando a year before the two teamed up for On the Waterfront. (Kazan was in the midst of naming names, so everything in the film can be viewed as allegory.) Bush named his oil company after the movie—Zapata Corp.—in which Brando plays a Mexican Indian revolutionary, casting that would not fly today. This tells us that any president pre-Clinton lived in a different world.
Bush the Younger, George W., who only became president because he failed at his dream job—president of the Texas Rangers—preferred fantasy, his favorite movie being Field of Dreams, which is all about mental illness and magical solutions. In the biopic W, Oliver Stone has Bush playing center field in a dream. A ball is driven to the deepest part of the park. Bush drifts back, camps under it, looks up, and waits. But the ball never comes. That look—the confusion in the eyes of the player waiting for a ball that never returns to earth, which is the look of a person who does not understand what the hell is happening—is Bush concentrated into a single image.
Maybe Carter identified with Joe Buck, the towheaded yokel turned into a prostitute by the city.
Barack Obama named The Godfather and The Godfather Part II as his favorites, the films offering a vision of subterranean statesmen at work, of our own government seen in a fun-house mirror—exaggerated but recognizable. Perhaps that’s why the self-aware Obama loved it, because it showed the executive branch for what it can be at its worst: a racket.
Joe Biden gave one of the great movie-related presidential quotes of all time, which, because I am not as cruel as the White House press corps, I have edited for clarity. Asked about people who deny climate change, Biden said, “There’s a movie about John Wayne. He’s an Indian scout. And they’re trying to get the—I think it was the Apache—back on the reservation. And they’re on their horses in their saddles. And there’s three or four Indians in headdresses, and the Union soldiers are basically saying to the Indians, ‘Come with me, we’ll take care of you. Everything will be good.’ And the Indian looks at John Wayne and points to the Union soldier and says, ‘He’s a lying, dog-faced pony soldier.’ Well, there’s a lot of lying, dog-faced pony soldiers out there about global warming.”
Most interesting is not the quote itself, nor the sentiment, but the fact that Biden seemed to be recalling not a single movie but a handful of Westerns that came out when he was a boy, including the 1952 Tyrone Power vehicle, Pony Soldier. Which is telling. Biden is the oldest president we’ve ever had, and when you get that old—a few Civil War veterans were still around when Pony Soldier was in theaters—memory turns the past into a mash-up, a collage of highlights. History is not what you remember but what you forget, the rock after the erosion. Text: these global-warming deniers are a bunch of bullshit artists. Subtext: Joe Biden is really old.
As for Trump, he has named several movies as his top choices—Citizen Kane; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly; Gone with the Wind—but, according to a 2022 New York magazine article, Sunset Boulevard is his favorite. It’s about Norma Desmond, a silent-film star who, having failed to make the transition into talkies, is moldering away in a creepy mansion that resembles a Hollywood Mar-a-Lago.
You can read a hundred meanings into this choice, but, in the end, it probably speaks to Trump because it’s about a star and an ungrateful public, a deep state that takes the form of idiotic directors and studio bosses, and a comeback that does not come off. Because the world has changed. Because the moving finger has moved along. Or, as Trump might say, “I am big. It’s the presidency that got small.”
Rich Cohen is an Editor at Large at AIR MAIL
