Booze In The White House

Clay Risen gives a short history of Presidents and their drink of choice:

If anything, Obama cuts against the tradition of chief-executive drinking by choosing beer as his relaxant of choice. Most presidents have kept whiskey on hand. George Washington was one of the biggest rye producers on the East Coast. Andrew Johnson, who occupied the White House between Lincoln and Grant, was drunk on whiskey pretty much his entire time in the executive branch. He took the oath of office as Lincoln’s vice president after a morning curled up with a bottle—“medicinal” whiskey, he said, for a cold. Six weeks later, hours after his boss was assassinated, Johnson was found in the second half of an epic bender, and had to be sobered up to take the oath of office as president.
If you think about Warren G. Harding—and really, do you ever think about Warren G. Harding?—you probably think of the Teapot Dome scandal. What you don’t think of was his love of whiskey. Though hardly an Andrew Johnson, Harding, president at the dawn of Prohibition, was a well-known imbiber. He had a well-stocked wine cellar, which his wife made him sell off before he took office. Still, the man knew how to party. Harding “sometimes acted more like a frat boy than a president,” wrote Don Van Natta Jr. in the New York Times a few years ago. He loved to drink, especially when involved in important executive functions, like golf. “He placed a wager on every swing, and despite Prohibition, he sipped cocktails as he played. When his on-course drinking caused an uproar, he switched to a private club where black-jacketed butlers served Scotch-and-sodas from silver trays.” And let’s not forget Ike. While still in uniform, over in Europe, he had a constant supply of bourbon shipped to his staff quarters. Eisenhower was hardly a souse. But he embodied the moment—an after-work whiskey was part of the postwar DNA, and if DDE did nothing else for the country, he set the tone for what Americans could and should slide down their throats.

I prefer that we elected the beer drinker-in-chief as opposed to his teetotaling opponent.