F-Bombs in the White House: Joe Biden Has Lots of Historic Company

As much of the virtual world now knows, President Obama was preparing to put his John Hancock on the new health care bill Tuesday when the veep stage-whispered in the president's ear that the legislation he was about to sign was a "big f***ing deal." As a modifier, this use of the venerable term was not hyperbole, although it was extraneous. Certainly Barack Obama knew the importance of health care reform -- he'd staked his presidency on it. But this is not the first time the Anglo-Saxon word has been uttered to, by, about, or on behalf of a president or a vice president. (It wasn't even Biden's first.)

The term, which apparently comes to us from Old English, has been around in written form for at least 500 years, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, and it was almost certainly in verbal usage before that. It has always been a vulgar term, a drawback offset by its versatility. It can be a threat and it can be pillow talk. It can be used as a noun, a verb, an interjection – or, by adding "ing" as Joe Biden did, an adjective or an adverb. It can be employed as a prefix or suffix -- and even inserted into the middle of another word for emphasis.

It's most spontaneous usage is the four-letter variety followed by the pronoun "you." This approach, with only a slight variation, was famously employed by Joe Biden's predecessor -- on the Senate floor, no less. During a 2004 photo shoot, Dick Cheney and Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy began sniping at each other, an exchange that Cheney punctuated by telling Leahy to do something to himself that is anatomically impossible. Later, Leahy professed himself to be "kind of shocked" to hear such language in the Senate, which that very day on a vote of 99-1 passed the Defense of Decency Act. Over on the House side, however, an Illinois Democrat named Rahm Emanuel wouldn't have been shocked at all.

Emanuel, who is now White House chief of staff, is known to favor the use of the f-word in nearly all these above-mentioned incarnations, particularly the one used by Dick Cheney. Emanuel uses it so habitually that his two brothers sent him a nameplate for his birthday that says: "Undersecretary for Go F*** Yourself."

I have two brothers myself, so I can relate. Inside one's family is where we tend to learn, and hone, our rhetorical skills. I recall the first time I heard an adult employ the f-word. That adult was my father, and I know the exact date -- as Casey Stengel liked to say, you could look it up. It was Sept. 9, 1965. I shared a room with one of my brothers then -- we were little kids -- and our dad came home from work in a happy mood one night during baseball season. Amid the sounds of the ice cubes clinking in a whiskey glass, we heard him exclaim to our mother: "Ginny, Sandy Koufax pitched a perfect game tonight. A f***ing perfect game!" ("Wow!" my 8-year-old brother whispered to me, his face breaking into a grin in the semi-dark bedroom. "Dad's cool. He talks like us.")

I didn't know it then, but they were talking like that in the White House, too. Lyndon Baines Johnson employed taboo words in everyday conversation there, and was particularly fond of utilizing the f-word to paint the most vivid and earthy images. But LBJ used the f-bomb in diplomacy, too. When Greece's ambassador to the United States informed President Johnson that even though Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou had approved the U.S. plans regarding Cyprus, Greece's prime minister couldn't control the Greek Parliament -- or ignore its constitution. "F*** your parliament and your constitution," LBJ replied. "America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea."

In "Sailing on the Silver Screen: Hollywood and the U.S. Navy," author Lawrence H. Suid relates how John F. Kennedy once attended about 10 minutes of a White House screening of a Warner Bros. picture called "Marines, Let's Go!" Kennedy had more than a passing interest: Warner Bros. was also making "PT-109," a story of JFK's heroics as a junior Navy officer. The president apparently was unimpressed: Turning to White House press secretary Pierre Salinger, Kennedy said, "Tell Jack Warner to go f*** himself."

On White House tapes, Kennedy is often heard using the more polite word "screw," so perhaps the film took the young president back to his Navy days -- and Lord knows, off-color prose is nothing special in the military. In a 1930 book, "Songs and Slang of the British Soldier," John Brophy writes that the f-word became so ubiquitous during World War I that it literally lessened, not heightened, the mood. "It became so common that an effective way for the soldier to express this emotion was to omit this word," he writes. "Thus if a sergeant said, 'Get your f****** rifles!' it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said, 'Get your rifles!' there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger."

Still, it was unmistakably ominous in March of 2002, only six months after 9/11, when White House National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was briefing three senators on Iraq when the commander-in-chief stuck his head in her office. "F*** Saddam," said George W. Bush. "We're taking him out."

John Kerry, the man who would run against Bush two years later, also got in a bit of trouble by rationalizing away his vote to authorize the Iraq invasion during an interview with Rolling Stone magazine by saying, "Did I expect George Bush to f*** it up as badly as he did?" Kerry asked rhetorically.

Four years later, another f-bomb was dropped by another ex-Navy man nominated by his party to run for president of the United States. It came during argument between John McCain and fellow Republican Sen. John Cornyn over immigration. "F*** you," McCain explained.

Even presidents who make a point of decorum sometimes find themselves pushed beyond the limits of polite vocabulary. Early in his first term, Ronald Reagan found himself in the Oval Office with Edward J. Rollins, the earthy White House political director. It seems that when asked in a Georgetown University class how the Reagan administration got Iowa Republican Sen. Roger Jepsen to change his vote on selling AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia, Rollins responded: "We just beat his brains out." This being Washington, the comment made the newspapers, and when Reagan visited Iowa, accompanied by Jepsen, hecklers lined the motorcade route, some carrying signs reading, "What brains?" In a time-honored tradition, Rollins was "taken to the woodshed," meaning, essentially, that he had to go apologize to the president.

Later that year, Rollins made the mistake of describing First Daughter Maureen Reagan, then running in a crowded Republican senatorial field in California, as having "the highest f****** negatives" he'd ever seen in a candidate. This prompted a phone call from Maureen to her father, and a second trip to the woodshed for Rollins, who later told some of his California buddies that an unsmiling Reagan had said to him, "Ed, let me put this in language you can understand: She's my f****** daughter!"

Reagan was a famously controlled customer and some Reaganites believe Rollins embellished his tale for effect. But presidents as far back as George Washington have lost their cool now and then -- often for good reason.

A five-star general before he became president, Dwight Eisenhower had a terrific temper and a vocabulary to match. "Sometimes," wrote aide Merlo Pusey, "his anger is aroused and it may set off a geyser of hot words." In "A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution," David Allen Nichols notes that Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. described the president's famous temper erupting after Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus reneged on his promise to the president to let black children enter Little Rock's public schools.
"Eisenhower would start getting red from the neck up," Brownell recalled, "and he certainly knew all of the right curse words." So Faubus probably got some long distance f-bombs. Good. He deserved it.

At the same time, wrote Eisenhower biographer Stephen Ambrose, Ike had a Victorian's sensibilities: he would also redden with embarrassment if he let so much as a "damn" or a "hell" escape his lips in front of a woman. (In this way, peace, not war, was "hell" for Eisenhower.) Ambrose also once wrote that it is a misconception that Richard Nixon dropped the f-bomb like confetti. Although Nixon certainly used other vulgar words more often -- the phrase "expletive deleted" was invented for him -- today he is remembered more for awkwardly avoiding an f-bomb. It came in a break between filming his famous series of interviews with David Frost after he left office. One Monday morning, Nixon startled Frost by asking him, apparently trying to be one of the guys, "David, did you do any fornicating this weekend?"

Somehow, that seemed even coarser. Or perhaps we've just become f****** blasé about the f-word. The other day, Rahm Emanuel was taking issue, in his own inimitable way, with liberals who vowed to go after moderate and conservative Democrats not yet aboard on health care reform. "F****** retarded!" was Emanuel's simple assessment. He was soon forced to apologize, though not to liberal Democrats, nor for dropping the f-word. No, as a sign of the times, he was taken to the woodshed for using the word "retarded," which was itself a euphemism at one time.

Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, it seems, was ahead of his time. Long before closed-caption options were widely available to the hearing impaired, Rockefeller had a Biden-Emanuel moment while being heckled at a 1976 campaign appearance. In response, Rocky wordlessly delivered an f-bomb -- with his middle finger. He delivered his bird with body language that said it all: F*** you!