• Bill Clinton, at the 2000 White House correspondents’ dinner: “Over the last few months I’ve lost 10 pounds. Where did they go? Why haven’t I produced them to the independent counsel? How did some of them manage to wind up on Tim Russert?”
• George H.W. Bush, at the 1989 Gridiron Club dinner: “People say I’m indecisive, but I don’t know about that.”
• Ronald Reagan, to protesters at UCLA: ” ‘Make love, not war’? By the looks of you, you don’t look like you could do much of either.”
• Jimmy Carter, riffing at the 1979 correspondents’ dinner about the old White House indoor swimming pool that Richard Nixon covered over to build the press room: Press Secretary Jody Powell “has been trying to persuade me to reopen the White House swimming pool — suddenly. … Any of you that survive would, of course, have permanent swimming privileges.”
• Gerald Ford, at a boozy Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association dinner in 1974: “At a time when funds for the defense budget may be cut, it’s comforting to see so many of the big guns from your industry still getting loaded.”
• Richard Nixon, in Ms. magazine in 1971 when asked about women’s lib: “Let me make one thing perfectly clear. I wouldn’t want to wake up next to a lady pipe fitter.”
• Lyndon Johnson, on Ford: “So dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.”
• John F. Kennedy, responding to criticism that Robert Kennedy wasn’t qualified to be attorney general: “I don’t see anything wrong with giving Bobby a little legal experience before he goes out on his own to practice law.”
• Dwight D. Eisenhower, when asked to name one big decision that Nixon helped make as vice president: “If you give me a week, I might think of one.”
• Harry S. Truman, on Adlai Stevenson: “He’s no better than a regular sissy.”
• Franklin D. Roosevelt, when told his wife was in a prison: “I’m not surprised. But what for?”
• Herbert Hoover: “Blessed are the young, for they shall inherit the national debt.”
• Calvin Coolidge, on Hoover: “That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad.”
• Warren G. Harding, referring to his penis, which he named Jerry, in a 1915 love letter to his mistress Carrie Fulton Phillips: “Jerry — you recall Jerry, whose cards I once sent you to Europe — came in while I was pondering your notes in glad reflection, and we talked about it.”
• Woodrow Wilson: “A conservative is someone who makes no changes and consults his grandmother when in doubt.”
• William Howard Taft: “Some men are graduated from college cum laude, some are graduated summa cum laude, and some are graduated mirabile dictu.”
• Theodore Roosevelt, on Taft: “A flub-dub with a streak of the second rate and common in him.”
• William McKinley, to his outgoing secretary of state, William R. Day, after he expressed sadness for leaving: “Well, Judge Day, every change so far in the office of secretary of state has been an improvement!”
• Grover Cleveland: “No man has ever yet been hanged for breaking the spirit of a law.”
• Benjamin Harrison: “When I hear a Democrat boasting himself of the age of his party, I feel like reminding him that there are other organized evils in the world older than the Democratic party.”
• Grover Cleveland, who had two separate administrations but just not enough good quips to fill them both, so we turn to a joke told not by but about Cleveland during the 1884 race, concerning rumors that he had fathered a child out of wedlock: “Ma, Ma, where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House. Ha ha ha!”
• Chester A. Arthur, dishing at a Republican banquet about how his ticket won Indiana: “If it were not for the reporters, I would tell you the truth.”
• James Garfield, on the presidency: “My God! What is there in this place that a man should ever want to get into it?”
• Rutherford B. Hayes, when told that a congressional uprising wanted to remove him and install Democrat Samuel J. Tilden: “Mr. Tilden will be arrested and shot.”
• Ulysses S. Grant, when told that Charles Sumner, a righteous senator from Massachusetts, didn’t believe in the Bible: “No, he didn’t write it.”
• Andrew Johnson: “Washington, D.C., is 12 square miles bordered by reality.”
• Abraham Lincoln: “If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?”
• James Buchanan, to his liquor merchants regarding their small bottles of bubbly: “Pints are very inconvenient in this house, as (champagne) is not used in such small quantities.”
• Franklin Pierce, when asked about a president’s duties after leaving office: “There’s nothing left … but to get drunk.”
• Millard Fillmore, declining an honorary degree from Oxford (and possibly poking fun at Andrew Jackson’s acceptance of one from Harvard): “I have not the advantage of a classical education, and no man should, in my judgment, accept a degree he cannot read.”
• Zachary Taylor, when a Whig first suggested that Taylor run for president: “Stop your nonsense and drink your whiskey!”
• James K. Polk, on Buchanan: “Mr. Buchanan is an able man but … sometimes acts like an old maid.”
• John Tyler, on his death bed: “Doctor, I am going. Perhaps it is best.”
• William Henry Harrison: “To Englishmen, life is a topic, not an activity.”
• Martin Van Buren: “As to the presidency, the two happiest days of my life were those of my entrance upon the office and my surrender of it.”
• Andrew Jackson: “John Calhoun, if you secede from my nation I will secede your head from the rest of your body.”
• John Quincy Adams, on Jackson: “A barbarian who cannot write a sentence of grammar and can hardly spell his own name.”
• James Monroe, to Alexander Hamilton: “You are a scoundrel.”
• James Madison, on his death bed: “I always talk better lying down.”
• Thomas Jefferson, on John Adams: “He is as disinterested as the being who made him.”
• John Adams, on Alexander Hamilton: “That bastard brat of a Scottish peddler!”
• George Washington, in a 1788 letter congratulating the Marquis de Chastellux on his recent marriage: “Now you are well served for coming to fight in favour of the American Rebels, all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, by catching that terrible Contagion — domestic felicity — which like the small pox or the plague, a man can have only once in his life: because it commonly lasts him (at least with us in America — I don’t know how you manage these matters in France) for his whole life time.”
Sources: “Presidential Anecdotes” by Paul F. Boller Jr., “White House Wit, Wisdom and Wisecracks: The Greatest Presidential Quotes,” by Phil Dampier and Ashley Walton, “The Wit & Wisdom of Ronald Reagan,” by James C. Humes, “The Ford Presidency: A History,” by Andrew Downer Crain, “American in Quotations,” by Bahman Dehgan, “Presidential Leadership in an Age of Change,” by Michael A. Genovese, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, “Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929,” by Maury Klein, the National Library for the Study of George Washington (at Mount Vernon), “The American Presidents from Polk to Hayes: What They Did, What They Said & What Was Said about Them,” by Robert A. Nowlan, “American Statesmen, Second Series, Volume III,” by Charles Sumner Olcott, “Crazy Sh*t Presidents Said,” by Robert Schnakenberg, Smithsonian.com, and the archives of the New York Times and The Washington Post.