Ike, Dick, and Stanley

You are remembered for the rules you break.

– Gen. Douglas MacArthur



Unlike Truman, Roosevelt, Harding, and the other White House residents who played poker to relax with advisors and friends, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon seldom if ever competed for even minimal stakes while in office. And the men who shared the Republican ticket in 1952 and 1956 certainly never mentioned the game while campaigning, even though both of them had played for life-changing stakes while serving in their country's armed forces.



Both future presidents had been born to working-class families, and they played as young men because they needed the money. We've already seen how, in 1915, an impoverished second lieutenant from the wilds of Abilene began courting Mamie Doud, a wealthy debutante out of Denver society pages whom he could not have afforded to date were it not for his poker winnings. Among the fancy meals and gifts young Ike lavished on Mamie was her engagement ring, a replica of his West Point class ring – an amethyst set in gold that she accepted on Valentine's Day, 1916.



While stationed at Fort Meade under Col. George Patton, Capt. Eisenhower continued to dominate the action among his fellow Army officers. Their highest-stakes game was reserved for bachelors and married men who could comfortably afford to lose. One player who flaunted this rule wound up losing so much to Ike that he was forced to cash in his wife's war bonds to make good on his IOU. Eisenhower reluctantly accepted payment, but felt so guilty afterward that he conspired with others in the game to lose the money back to the man. "This was not achieved easily," Eisenhower recalled decades later. "One of the hardest things known to man is to make a fellow win in poker who plays as if bent on losing every nickel." He then persuaded his friend Col. Patton to immediately ban poker at the fort, if only to keep the same fellow from squandering any more money. The sour experience was enough to persuade Eisenhower that, as an officer, "I had to quit playing. It was not because I didn't enjoy the excitement of the game – I really love to play. But it had become clear that it was no game to play in the Army."



Nixon, for his part, was raised in East Whittier, a working-class Quaker community 12 miles southeast of Los Angeles, where any kind of gambling, he said, was "anathema." His family's modest means forced him to turn down a full-tuition scholarship to Harvard in 1930 because it didn't include living expenses and would have kept him from helping out at his family's gas station and grocery store. Instead, he attended Whittier, the small Quaker college not far from his home. A star debater as an undergraduate, he did accept a scholarship to the Duke School of Law, then returned home to practice in Whittier, where he married Pat Ryan, a schoolteacher and aspiring actress, in June 1940. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for sea combat duty, but because of his age, 30, and advanced education, the Navy assigned him to the South Pacific Combat Air Transport at Gaudalcanal and later on Green Island. He spent the war preparing manifests and flight plans for C-47 Skytrains, prosaic but necessary duty that helped make US forces more mobile than their Japanese adversaries. Promoted to lieutenant, Nixon served in the Pacific from May 1943 until December 1944.



His austere Quaker upbringing prohibited poker, of course, but as he later admitted, "the pressures of wartime, and the even more oppressive monotony, made it an irresistible diversion. I found playing poker instructive as well as entertaining and profitable."



"Nick," as his Navy buddies called him, was "as good a poker player as, if not better than, anyone we had ever seen," one of them testified. "I once saw him bluff a lieutenant commander out of $1,500 with a pair of deuces." While serving on Green Island, Nick was invited to a small dinner party for the celebrity pilot Charles Lindbergh. Having earlier agreed to host a poker game that night, Nick RSVPed in the negative. As he explained in RN, his autobiography: "in the intense loneliness and boredom of the South Pacific our poker games were more than idle pastimes, and the etiquette surrounding them was taken very seriously."



Since most American fighting men played, Nixon's participation might be seen simply as part of his lifelong campaign to be a regular guy, but in 1970, historian Garry Wills made perfectly clear how much more to it there was. In Nixon Agonistes, he pointed out that his subject's "Quaker mother did not approve of gambling, but he had eased his way into the military past her scruples. The war became a moral hiatus. Besides, motive is what matters, and Nick's motive was pure, was puritan. He was not playing games; with him it was a business." Wills continued: "Show him the rules, and he will play your game, no matter what, and beat you at it. Because with him it is not a game."



Presidential biographer Bela Kornitzer agreed: "Out there Nixon passed over the traditional Quaker objections to gambling. Why? He needed money. He learned poker and mastered it to such a degree that he won a sizable amount, and it became the sole financial foundation of his career." Assessing that checkered career, Wills noted long before Watergate: "It helps, watching Nixon's 'ruthless' singlemindedness when bigger pots have been played, to remember those poker days." Sometimes, in other words, the game is more than just a game.



Reminding us that Nixon had the luxury of getting "to know his fellows, not in foxholes but across the tables," Wills zeroed in on the lieutenant's "iron butt." "Nick, as always, did his homework. He found poker's local theoreticians, men willing to play and discuss, replay and debate, out of sheer analytic zeal." He persuaded one expert, Jim Stewart, to spend five days coaching him on draw strategy. Stewart schooled Nick in the same percentages that Bob Davis had drilled into Ike and Monty had taught to Herb Yardley. Nixon's term for such preparations was war-gaming. He reveled in risk-averse theory and began to make money playing tight, rocky poker. He also had an instance of Pettigrew-caliber luck when, while holding the ace of diamonds, he drew four cards to make a royal flush, about a 250,000-1 shot. "I was naturally excited," he said. "But I played it with a true poker face, and won a substantial pot." What he didn't say was how many bets he had to call to draw to that lonesome red ace.



The bottom line was that Nick took home about $8,000 from those Navy games, a genuinely whopping haul in the '40s. "With my pay, Pat's salary, and my poker winnings, we had managed to save $10,000 during the war," he wrote on Page 34 of RN. In its 1,136 crowded pages, that's the second and final mention of the p-word, and one he's at pains not to highlight. Upon discharge, however, he used those impressive winnings to bankroll his first congressional campaign in 1946, when he defeated the popular incumbent Jerry Voorhis in part by accusing the 45-year-old FDR Democrat of being a draft-dodging communist – though he did refrain from calling him "a jerry." In 1950, he used the communist smear and other dirty tricks to swiftboat Helen Gahagan Douglas, a three-term congresswoman once called "ten of the twelve most beautiful women in America," for a seat in the U.S. Senate. After Nixon called her "The Pink Lady" and claimed the attractive New Dealer was "pink right down to her underwear," she retorted with a nickname that stuck: "Tricky Dick."



Historians and candidates have numerous motives, of course, but it's clear that quite a few of them have thought of poker as either a dirty secret or "just a game," never as a key to achievement. Whereas if a famous man split rails, shot buffalo, or played football – or played a character who did – we got to read a chapter or hear a speech about it, with more than a few Gipper or White Hunter moments sprinkled in thereafter. Even today, "Governator" Arnold Schwarzenegger is evidently more proud of his steroid-fueled pecs and flamboyantly homicidal film roles, as John Kerry is of his grouse-hunting and George Bush is of his exercise regimens, than other candidates are of whatever poker skills they might possess – skills much more relevant to the job they aspire to, including intelligence, self-control, risk and resource management, and the ability to leverage uncertainty.



What Wills also showed back in 1970 was that while Lt. Nixon had played ruthlessly, Gen. Eisenhower was even better at poker, perhaps because he was more of a natural – and played with a greater sense of virtue, to boot. "Like Nixon, he made large sums of money in the long games at military bases," wrote Wills. "Unlike Nixon, he was so good he had to stop playing with enlisted men; he was leaving too many of them broke." He also helped to keep his favorite game honest. While stationed at Camp Colt in Pennsylvania in 1917, he learned that a well-connected junior officer had used a marked deck in a stud game. Capt. Eisenhower told him to either resign or face a court-martial. The officer chose the former option but reneged on even that; he returned to the base with his father and congressman, who requested that the cheater be transferred to a new post instead. Eisenhower firmly explained that no officer could be effective in the field without personal integrity, and that transferring the culprit would merely be passing the problem along to other soldiers; that was something he wasn't going to do. A more senior officer eventually greased the way for the transfer, but Eisenhower had stood his ground on this principle. Yet in spite of his ethical and profitable play, by the time Ike's advisors persuaded him to choose Dick Nixon as his running mate in '52, both politicians had stopped playing or even mentioning poker, fearing voters would think it unsavory – though Dr. Albert Upton, Nixon's drama coach at Whittier, was moved to declare: "A man who couldn't hold a hand in a first-class poker game isn't fit to be President of the United States."



How could any voter disagree with such an obvious truth? One reason is that what Wills calls the "cult of the common man" makes so many people "think of their heroes as rising almost by magic, rather than by ambition, hard effort, and shrewd calculation." Ever since our earliest presidents aristocratically refused to campaign for the job, many voters came to believe that the clever calculations of a frankly ambitious candidate – or poker player – were traits to be counted against him.

Poker's reputation as a backroom cheating game was another political minus, even though by 1952 it was usually played on the square, and even though malfeasance occurred in every game Americans loved, baseball most certainly included. The Brooklyn Dodgers, after all, had just been cheated out of the '51 National League pennant when the Giants used a telescope and buzzer wire to tip Bobby Thompson that Ralph Branca's next pitch would be a fastball. Meanwhile, even friendly little White House poker games had to be kept from the public, despite the fact that poker went hand in hand with military weapons and tactics that had won World War II and bolstered our Cold War diplomacy. Why try to scrub poker from campaign biographies, then? Because playing it wasn't virtuous in obvious ways. It involved gambling, for one thing, sometimes in combination with hard liquor, foul cigars, and loose women in pink or no underwear. Even worse, you either lost money or took other people's – not by hard, honest, Puritan toil, but by intelligence and cunning.



Then there was what might be called the Stanley Kowalski factor. Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire had been wildly successful both commercially and critically, winning a pair of Tony Awards as well as the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The film version, directed by Elia Kazan, dominated the '52 Academy Award season and was one of the most talked-about American movies as that year's presidential campaign was getting under way.



Williams' masterpiece dramatized the dark side of poker as it was played in New Orleans just after the war. Set in a grimy French Quarter tenement in the city where the game had originated, Streetcar presented a world in which uncouth veterans drink, bellow, smoke, and fornicate between hands of poker. (The Poker Night, in fact, was Williams' working title.) Except for one gentleman, Mitch, they all behave like dogs – as in, "You dog, you." The main female characters are the bitchily insecure temptress Blanche DuBois and her sister, Stella Kowalski. As the women absorb the manly heat given off by the tabletop ritual, the center of everyone's attention is Stanley Kowalski (played by 24-year-old Marlon Brando in the Broadway premiere as well as the film version), who throws his muscular weight around in the original wife-beater T-shirt. A self-proclaimed "king," he slaps his pregnant wife, causing Mitch to ineffectually complain, "Poker should not be played in a house with women." Stanley soon ramps up the violence by raping his vulnerably attractive "queen" of a sister-in-law. The last line of the play, "This is seven-card stud," reinforces the brutally seminal nature of French Quarter manhood. Once again, poker prowess had been equated in the popular imagination with sadistic macho potency.



For millions of American voters, especially women, Brando's muscular stud-playing rapist became an icon of unchecked male power. Little wonder, then, that politicians running for the highest office in the land would downplay their love for the pastime of lugs like Kowalski.