We have just lived through the most volatile, unpredictable, and wild month in the history of presidential politics. In July, we saw a shocking breach in presidential security enabling the near-miss assassination of a former president; his bloody rise from the ground, fist pumping in the air; and a third consecutive convention nomination by his party.
Meantime, establishment forces in government and media flipped their story concerning the health and mental fitness of the incumbent president, leading to an unprecedentedly late change at the top of the ticket. Through a steady barrage of negative headlines and party maneuvering, a president who had spent a half century working in Washington was forced to withdraw so that his party could ignore the results of its own primaries and put forward a younger candidate, launched with an ecstasy unseen (or so we’re told) since Kennedy’s Camelot. Belatedly, the incumbent president addressed the nation to justify his change of heart but wound up explaining little, while demonstrating what everyone already knew.
Whew. That’s a lot.
But could there be more? According to presidential history, August is the month we should really worry about, most especially our incumbent president, who has just implicitly admitted that he is not up to the job. This could be a real problem if August does what it often does—deliver the big, the strange, and the unexpected.
The most dramatic example of this phenomenon, of course, came in 1914, with the arrival of World War I, with what Barbara Tuchman described unforgettably as “The Guns of August.” The United States entered the war in 1917 and lost 116,000 “doughboys” in the fighting.
Another August shock happened in 1923, when President Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack. He was only 57. Vermont congressman Porter Hale tracked down Vice President Calvin Coolidge at his father’s house with the news, and Coolidge’s father (a notary public) swore in the former vice president at 2:47 a.m. using the family Bible.
More recently, the curse of August seems to have accelerated. In August 1965, the Watts riots ignited after Los Angeles police officers tried to arrest 21-year-old Marquette Frye for drunk driving. The riots killed 34 people and cost $40 million in property damage. This was one of the first of the “long, hot summer” riots of the 1960s that plagued President Lyndon Johnson in every summer of his presidency.
Hurricane season in the United States runs from June to November. But for presidents, the worst hurricanes hit in August. In 1969, Hurricane Camille caused the deaths of more than 250 people and $1.4 billion in the Gulf Coast. Richard Nixon was in his first year as president and brought in federal resources, including 16,000 military personnel, to deal with the disaster, He also sent Vice President Spiro Agnew to survey the situation. Agnew’s report led to the recognition of the need for a hurricane severity measure, leading to the Category 1 through 5 scale that we use today.
That scale was in use when Hurricane Andrew hit Florida in August of 1992, but it did not help President George H. W. Bush. Bush was seen as slow to respond to the disaster, and the plaintive cry of Dade County emergency operations director Kate Hale—“Where in the hell is the cavalry on this one?”—helped lead to a perception that Bush was not on top of things domestically. He lost his bid for reelection to Bill “I feel your pain” Clinton that November.
Bush’s son George W. was also partially undone by an August hurricane, 2005’s Hurricane Katrina. When that storm hit, Bush was on vacation in Texas, and a number of key political and communications staffers were away in Mykonos, Greece, attending communications director Nicolle Wallace’s wedding. The team was not at full strength, and Bush got much of the blame for the disaster, which killed over 1,800 people and caused $148 billion in damages.
August isn’t just a month for natural disasters. Some of the biggest international crises have hit in the eighth month. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Bush 41 recovered quickly and formed an international coalition that went on to oust Hussein from Kuwait. The next August, Bush faced another international crisis, as old-guard Soviets unhappy with Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms placed the general secretary under house arrest. When Bush’s national security adviser Brent Scowcroft told the president about the coup, Bush complained that U.S. officials were surprised by the development. Scowcroft had the perfect retort: “Yes, so was Gorbachev.”
The final kind of August surprise has been scandal. Neither the Watergate burglary nor the original revelation of Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky happened in August, but the denouement of each scandal did. Nixon resigned in August 1974, elevating his unelected vice president Gerald Ford to the presidency. Clinton, faced with DNA evidence of his affair with Lewinsky on her infamous Gap blue dress, finally ended his repeated denials of the affair. He addressed the nation from the Map Room and confessed that “I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.” Here, for once, August proved a respite. Clinton went to Martha’s Vineyard with his family in an attempt to repair the relationships damaged by his admission.
There likely isn’t an American alive who could imagine a month more tumultuous than this past July for presidential politics. By all rational odds, things will calm down from here. Still, history warns: don’t bet on it.
Photo by ELIJAH NOUVELAGE/Getty Images (left) and KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/Getty Images (right)