August is the cruelest month — for American presidents

Forget the poet (T.S. Eliot) who proclaimed April to be the “cruelest month.” August is no summer picnic for U.S. presidents. As President Biden has discovered, a presidential vacation can be rudely interrupted by foreign and domestic crises. 

Just when tropical-level heat and humidity turn Washington into an urban steam bath, and Congress takes its annual summer recess, modern presidents have tried to steal a few days of respite from their daily burdens in family enclaves at Hyannis Port, Mass., Kennebunkport, Maine, Bedminster, N.J., and Texas ranches, or tony resorts in Jackson Hole, Wyo., and Martha’s Vineyard.

But the world’s complexities continue to dog them in the dog days of summer. One could even argue that malevolent forces might take advantage of distracted presidents or that vacationing and diverted commanders in chief can exacerbate brewing problems. Criticism of President Biden’s initial decision to remain at Camp David mounted even before the Taliban had solidified its conquest of Kabul. And the ill-considered photo of him sitting alone at an empty seminar table, staring at a video screen, produced a less than inspiring image. 

Presidential Lesson #1: Just because you have scheduled your vacation doesn’t mean you should take it if a crisis is unfolding. 

Lesson #2: If you are on holiday when a disaster strikes, head back to Washington immediately and don’t simply fly over the devastation. Just ask George W. Bush. Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast in August 2005 while Bush 43 bushwhacked and mountain-biked at his Crawford, Texas ranch. When the levees broke in New Orleans, and a photographer captured a picture of him peering out the window of Air Force One high above the inundated region, he created a portrait that still haunts Bush’s legacy.

Lesson #3: Pay attention to your August intelligence briefings, which can predict September havoc. Witness President Bush’s Daily Brief of Aug. 6, 2001, presented to him as he vacationed at his Texas ranch, warning, “Bin Laden Planning to Strike in U.S.” As Bush focused on giving a speech from the “Western White House” on stem cell research, the U.S. was only five weeks away from al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks and the beginning of the War on Terror. Twenty Augusts later, we are reaping the bitter harvest of that war’s launch in Afghanistan.

Some presidents have responded to the guns of August much more effectively. George H.W. Bush handled Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait with statesmanship developed over his long career as a World War II combat veteran, diplomat, CIA director, and vice president. “This will not stand,” he famously declared about Saddam’s aggression, in a South Lawn press conference after returning from Camp David. Bush 41’s successful prosecution of the 1991 Gulf War resulted from his experience and leadership. 

Lesson #4: Use the White House as a dramatic backdrop to reassure the public.

Bill Clinton’s 1998 August represented the nadir of his presidency. After independent counsel Ken Starr forced him to testify for a deposition in the Monica Lewinsky affair, Clinton had to admit to a national television audience that he had engaged in an “improper physical relationship” with the intern. The next day he departed for Martha’s Vineyard and the scenes of him, separated from the first lady by their daughter as they exited the White House, gave every indication of a marital rift. Two days later, President Clinton ordered the bombing of al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan and Sudan, in retaliation for terrorist attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, but failed to eliminate Bin Laden. 

Lesson #5: Take care that a military decision, no matter how legitimate, doesn’t appear to be an effort to distract from a scandal.

Equally consequential for U.S. defense policy was the August 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which North Vietnamese gunboats fired on a U.S. destroyer. Lyndon Johnson used the event to secure a congressional resolution to escalate American forces fighting to protect South Vietnam from communist takeover. By the time he declined to run for re-election in 1968, the beleaguered LBJ had ordered more than 500,000 troops to Southeast Asia. When we withdrew seven years later, nearly 60,000 had lost their lives in a lost cause. 

Lesson #6: Limited wars to save unpopular regimes are doomed to fail.

The seeds of the Vietnam debacle were sown in summer 1963, as President Kennedy mourned the loss of his premature son, Patrick, that August. JFK commuted from Washington most weekends to the family’s Cape Cod compound to be with his wife and two young children, but he had to contemplate the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam and whether the U.S. would support a coup to remove South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Diem. With Kennedy’s advisers split over the decision, and many of them also on vacation, uncertainty reigned among American diplomats and military leaders. In November 1963, Diem was assassinated just three weeks before JFK met the same fate. 

Lesson #7: Beware the combination of summer’s distractions and personal family tragedy.

Obviously, the worst August for an incumbent president saw Richard Nixon resign over Watergate. He surely wished that Congress members had decamped to their home states in 1974. Instead, leaders of his own party arrived at the White House to tell him the House would impeach and the Senate would convict him. The previous summer, the Senate Watergate Committee had discovered that Nixon taped discussions and phone calls. In August 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the president had to surrender the subpoenaed tapes as evidence in the criminal trials of his advisers. 

Lesson #8: When Congress, the Supreme Court, the press and public opinion have turned against the president, it’s time for him to go on a permanent vacation.

Julius Caesar was warned to “beware the Ides of March.” American presidents should take special heed every August. Whether purely coincidental or utterly predictable, variables in the calendar’s eighth month have proved costly for presidents and their country.

Barbara A. Perry is Presidential Studies director and Gerald L. Baliles Professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Follow her on Twitter @BarbaraPerryUVA.