Ulysses S. Grant - Michael Korda [49]
Then as now victorious American generals expected to be taken care of for life, and Grant was no exception. Nowadays they join the boards of major corporations and head think tanks and foundations; then they accepted outright gifts from grateful citizens and remunerative railway directorships. Having moved virtually straight from the army to the White House, Grant had not had an opportunity to cash in on his victories. Later, when the Grants went on their famous world tour, it did not escape their attention that victorious English generals had been rewarded far more lavishly. John Churchill was created Duke of Marlborough for his victories over Louis XIV and given Blenheim Palace and enough money to support it. And Wellington was not only made a duke but given innumerable estates, a great house on Piccadilly at Hyde Park Corner, and a substantial fortune for his victory over Napoleon. By comparison the Grants felt themselves to be very modestly rewarded indeed, particularly since they liked to hobnob with the very richest of the new rich. Galena and (oddly enough) Philadelphia had chipped in with homes for the Grants, but they were far from well off and would be still less so when Grant left the White House.
One reason, therefore, why Grant stayed for two terms as president (and later made an unsuccessful bid for a third) was that the Grants had no concrete plans for the future after he left the White House. It was not so much that Grant enjoyed being president—he had had none of the fierce presidential ambition that motivates so many who seek the office, and indeed, in a very real sense, the office sought him, not the other way round—but he had nothing much else in mind, and once he was settled in, began to think of the White House as his home. It was large, run like a military establishment, furnished richly enough to satisfy Mrs. Grant, and could provide roast turkey at every meal—the only meat Grant ate with anything approaching enthusiasm.
The job of being president he approached with less enthusiasm. It is perhaps one of the real misfortunes of the Grant administration that John A. Rawlins, his aide from Galena and now secretary of war, who had fallen out with Grant during the war, shocked by the growing casualties after the Wilderness, was already a very sick man, suffering from tuberculosis in an age when that was still an incurable disease. Had Grant been surrounded, supported, protected, advised, and “coached,” as modern presidents are, by a team of advisers under Rawlins’s eagle eye, his presidency might have succeeded better than it did. Just as Rawlins, when he had been well, and close to Grant, had mostly been able to keep him from the bottle (and shield him from the consequences when he managed to avoid Rawlins’s vigilance) during the war, so Rawlins in the White House might have been able to protect the president from his natural inability to distinguish cheats, sharpers, thieves, and con artists from honest men. Though in many respects shrewd and thoughtful, Grant was a total innocent when it came to anything involving money, and being almost supernaturally honest himself, he found it difficult to detect dishonesty in others. Besides, he was enormously loyal. He often managed to ignore proof of wrongdoing even when it was brought to him.
These are not the ideal characteristics for a president of the United States, and in the absence of a personality as forceful as Rawlins (who died in 1869, in the first year of