John Strausbaugh understands all too well that while presidents come and go, Elvis remains eternal.
Part essay, part photo album, Mr. Strausbaugh's new book, "Alone With the President," cogently examines the convergence of popularity and political power as manifested in U.S. presidents from John Kennedy to Ronald Reagan.
In fact, the image that stares out from the book's cover reduces that popularity-as-power equation to convenient shorthand: Richard Nixon in a bizarre grip-and-grin shot with Elvis Presley.
"It's the most popular picture of a president ever taken, because it's not a photo of the president," says Mr. Strausbaugh, 42, speaking over the phone from New York City, where he moved in 1990 after having lived in Baltimore virtually his entire life. "It's a photo of Elvis with the president."
Taken just before Christmas in 1970, that photo, plus 15 others of Mr. Nixon and Mr. Presley included in the book, help Mr. Strausbaugh recount the two men's sudden, surreal encounter. Elvis, it seems, wanted a federal narcotics agent's badge for his collection of cop-related paraphernalia -- as Mr. Strausbaugh points out in his book, the badge also would allow Elvis to tote his pistol anywhere in the United States legally -- and was told that the only man who could provide him with one was the president. So he hopped a flight to Washington and dropped in on Mr. Nixon.
The president gave the King a badge. The King gave the president autographed photos of himself, plus a gold-plated .45 pistol and a handful of bullets. A White House photographer snapped away.
"Alone With the President," published by Blast Books, teems with similarly odd presidential photo-ops: the casually elegant (JFK and actor/brother-in-law Peter Lawford cruising on a sloop); the strangely beautiful (Lyndon Johnson and actor Gregory Peck reclining together in a field of black-eyed Susans); the rigidly arranged (Mr. Nixon gesticulating to singer Johnny Cash); the profoundly moving (Gerald Ford and baseball announcer Joe Garagiola pensively watching the '76 presidential election results together on TV); the truly extraterrestrial (Jimmy Carter and artist Andy Warhol stiffly chatting); the damningly telling (Ronald and Nancy Reagan in a makeshift chorus line with actress Shirley Jones and composer Marvin Hamlisch); and the relentlessly ubiquitous (Bob Hope and the Rev.Billy Graham invading every president's Oval Office).
But if these weird celebrity encounters constitute the book's obvious hook, its meat consists of Mr. Strausbaugh's short, trenchant essays on the innate power of imagery and how presidents from Kennedy to Mr. Reagan used it or were used up by it.
As part of his research, Mr. Strausbaugh visited each of the presidents' libraries "and just went with what the photos and reading about the guys and thinking about them made me say."
Accordingly, Mr. Strausbaugh points out that JFK deftly manipulated his image, from his famous first TV debate with Mr. Nixon in 1960 (Kennedy didn't debate, Mr. Strausbaugh says, he performed) to his masterfully orchestrated press conferences. JFK lived out his father's credo: It's not what a person is that counts, but what the public thinks he is. And Kennedy's crafty molding of his own image led the public to think of him as a star.
In his chapter on Kennedy, Mr. Strausbaugh writes that "JFK entered the White House looking like a glamorous movie star, became a TV star while he was there, and went out as a semidivine hero of popular mythology."
Successively, Johnson, Mr. Nixon, Mr. Ford and Mr. Carter wrestled with the reality of popularity as power -- none more brilliantly than Mr. Nixon, whose handlers honed sound-bite/photo-op politics to a calculated art form.
Pure image
Then came Mr. Reagan.
"At that point," Mr. Strausbaugh says, "you had the apotheosis of celebrity in the White House. Reagan was the first president -- and so far the only one -- who was pure image. It made a nice arc to start with Kennedy and follow that apotheosis of celebrity through to Reagan. Liberals like to go on and on and on about what a redneck he was and awful Republican and conservative and just a TV star, but in a lot of ways he represents a culmination of stuff their hero John Kennedy had started."
LBJ lusted after the Kennedy luster, but merely chased it. Johnson felt uneasy with celebrities, and Mr. Strausbaugh's book reminds us of LBJ's brushes with vacuous actor George Hamilton (who briefly romanced Johnson's daughter, Lynda) and his clash with singer/actress Eartha Kitt, who turned a White House luncheon with Johnson's wife, Lady Bird, into an indictment of the president's policies.
Mr. Strausbaugh says that Jimmy Carter's presidency unraveled his appealing outsider image evaporated. In "Alone With the President," Mr. Carter flashes the same frozen, forced, mile-wide smile at everyone: Warhol, Willie Nelson, the Pope, mime Marcel Marceau. He almost always appears ill at ease.
"We rejected him on his image of being an ineffective, sour recluse of a president," Mr. Strausbaugh says. "Not on the basis of any sort of administrative ineffectiveness. He was no worse than anyone else. As Reagan proved, we have a high tolerance for ineffective presidents as long as they're making us feel good."
Conversely, he thinks that Gerald Ford's bumbling, stumbling public persona belied his true nature. "He turned out to be my favorite guy," Mr. Strausbaugh says with a chuckle. "Clearly, he was a charming guy; clearly, he had a lot of sex appeal. He wasn't a very public figure, but privately he was partying up a storm. Look at [Ford's wife] Betty -- she's become the patron saint of reformed partiers."
True to form, the book shows Mr. Ford partying hearty with Flip Wilson, Nanette Fabray and Wayne Newton, while flirting with singer Vikki Carr. And Betty is shown doing the bump with frizzy-haired comedian Marty Allen.
Mr. Strausbaugh says he nixed the idea of including Dwight Eisenhower because "it was going to be hard enough for readers under 40 to have any sort of reaction to the Kennedy photos, maybe even the LBJ photos, let alone Ike photos." George Bush, of course, was still in the White House when Mr. Strausbaugh researched his book.
Every successful president, beginning with George Washington, "has been quick to exploit new mediums of communicating their images," Mr. Strausbaugh says.
Washington, he explains, had "very specific kinds of portraits of himself done, which were then turned into etchings, which were then mass-produced and spread around the country. And Abe Lincoln was instantly on to the new technology of photography.
Catching on quickly
When it gets into the 20th century and things start accelerating -- Hollywood, radio, then TV -- you see the cleverer and more successful politicians latching on to each new medium and exploiting it, usually quite intelligently, very early on.
This holds true for the most recent presidential campaign, too. The smarter candidates took up new alternatives while discarding the sound-bite/photo-op standard pioneered by Mr. Nixon in 1968 and repeatedly pulverized until it reached its nadir in 1988 with Mr. Bush vs. Michael Dukakis.
Two years ago, Jerry Brown made a surprisingly strong run for the Democratic nomination with the aid of his toll-free telephone number. Ross Perot used the prepaid infomercial phenomenon. And Bill Clinton chucked what Mr. Strausbaugh calls his foundering "traditional campaign with traditional issues" to embrace pop culture, appearing on MTV and "The Arsenio Hall Show."
"It worked for Bill Clinton," says Mr. Strausbaugh, referring back to the Mr. Nixon-with-Elvis image that inspired him to examine the notion of popularity as power in the first place. "He emerged in the spring of '92 as this whole new pop-culture candidate, the first confessed Elvis imitator ever to run for office."