The Blacksheep Online | Can-Smasher-in-Chief: America's Drunkest Presidents

Can-Smasher-in-Chief: America's Drunkest Presidents

February 18, 2010 - 10:45 am | Posted by: Staff

A Black Sheep history lesson in the spirit of America's second-most pointless holiday: Presidents' Day

Being the President of the United States of America must be one hell of a stressful job. Have you ever looked at before-and-after pictures of former presidents? They look like zombies by the time they leave office. Thankfully though, there is a method of stress relief that has kept our fearless leaders fresh on their toes for hundreds of years. Whether they're slurring the words to "Friends in Low Places" or splitting a bottle of Burnett's Vanilla with a foreign dignitary, this is the Black Sheep' salute to America's drunkest presidents.

Plenty of presidents have been prolific boozehounds, but one stands above the rest, and his name is Ulysses S. Grant. That Grant was a straight-up alcoholic is well documented. Considered the Bluto of presidents, Grant once threw an oil lamp out of a White House window, setting the South Lawn on fire, while insisting he had been "reading" at the time of the incident. Of course, the stumbling, slurring speech and prompt vomiting upon being questioned were dead giveaways.

Grant boozed long before he became president, though, and it certainly didn't affect his strategic planning. Upon hearing that Grant constantly drank whiskey as a field general in the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln told his aide to find out what brand he preferred and to ship a case to each general so that the North could actually have a shot at winning the war.

My personal favorite of imbibing executives, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was well known not only for repealing Prohibition, clearly making him the best president of all time, but also for his monstrous appetite for gin and vermouth. According to his son's book, he was a surprisingly awful bartender, making "the worst martinis in Washington." On the other hand, the man was known to begin drinking at breakfast and even reputedly out drank contemporary barflies Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin on the night after the Yalta conference. Your high school history teacher would have you believe that old FDR was in a wheelchair due to polio, but I think we all know why his legs didn't work for the same reason he left Eleanor "unfulfilled" night after whiskey-logged night.

I decided early on when writing this article that I wouldn't rip George Bush too hard. Everyone knows he was a coked-up ex-fratboy alcoholic who got busted for a DUI in the '70s, and ran over his neighbors' garbage cans driving home one night. Junior swears the hooch hasn't touched his lips in over two decades, but the way he ran the country for the past eight years, I gotta believe he was half in the bag and three sheets to the wind before 11am pretty much every day.

John Adams, our second president, was chain-smoking at eight years old, drinking by the age of ten, and usually throwing back three or four pints with breakfast all by the time he attended Harvard University at the age of fifteen. He continued these incredible habits well throughout the course of his life before dying of natural causes at age 90. Like the whiskey he was undoubtedly filled with, he aged well.

Franklin Pierce, our fourteenth president, was known to drink multiple bottles of brandy and rye in one sitting. Upon the Democratic Party's decision not to re-nominate him for a second term, he stated to a friend, "There is nothing left but to get drunk."

John F. Kennedy, believe it or not, was not much for booze. At least, that's what he told Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. when they were powering through bottles of brandy and doing lines of coke off of Marilyn Monroe's nipples.

Of course, these prolific are only a few highlights. I wouldn't want to be leader of the free world myself, but that's just because there are pictures of me on the Internet doing embarrassing things (remember the "Numa Numa" kid? That was me, age fifteen). Also, I drink too much - a fact that I thought automatically excluded me from ever being president. Turns out we've had plenty of boozers in America's highest office over the past couple centuries. No wonder this country's going down the shitter. And to think, I've been blaming it all on Sarah Palin.