FDR liked his martinis

Timothy Egan makes the connection between consumption of adult beverages in the White House and the competency of the first resident.

Another Oval Office abstainer was William Howard Taft, who made such a mess of his single term that he came in third when he tried to get re-elected in 1912. Food was Taft’s vice; he ballooned to nearly 350 pounds at one point.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was a martini drinker, much to Eleanor’s displeasure, and an extraordinary president. Again, was there a connection? Solving a Great Depression and crushing the Nazi war machine — aided by the oft-besotted Winston Churchill — is a pretty strong brief.
In his younger days, F.D.R. knew how to plan ahead. He had four cases of Old Reserve delivered to his town house on East 65th Street just before Prohibition went into effect.
Which brings us to the Great Experiment, 1920 to 1933, when fanatics outlawed an accepted public behavior that had existed since well before Jesus changed water into wine to keep a wedding party going at Cana. Prohibition, W. C. Fields recalled, was a time “when I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.”
According to Daniel Okrent, author of “Last Call,” Herbert Hoover once had a large wine cellar. His wife gave it all away before Hoover’s disastrous single term. Hmmm.

 The connection between Hoover, Carter, and Bush the younger is clear.

Grand Ol' Wingnuttery

Think the venom Obama has to deal with is new?  Think again.

So Crow was insane. But he was also by no means atypical of the venom spewing Republicans of the 1940s. We think of Obama facing some uniquely crazy Republican opposition but it’s not so original. This kind of hackery goes back a long ways. Of course, the Republican Party of the 1940s had more than just crazies, and that’s why Crow hated Morse so much. But add a little geographical realignment to the mix and it’s not hard to see how complete wingnuttery would come to take over the entire Republican Party. 

The Republican party of the 1940s had been completely out of power for more than a decade, feeding the frenzy of their impotent hatred.  But that rising bile would eventually weaken the Democratic party in ways we're still feeling today.  It started with Yalta where FDR "lost Europe" to Stalin, and reached it's apotheosis when Truman and the "China hands lost China," when China was not ours to lose.  There was a direct line from there to Joe McCarthy and disastrous foreign policy decisions in Asia by administrations terrified of "losing" first Korea than Vietnam.