All Presidents have the same lesson to learn, and they all learn it on the first full morning of their respective Administrations.
At that point they have already taken their Oaths, already declared their principles to the nation, already enjoyed the first round of formal celebrations, already plopped their asses in the Oval Office and thought, I have made it. They have all settled in to what they imagine will be an Administration marked by great words and historic deeds. They are all ready for the lesson that will haunt them throughout the remainder of their days in power, the lesson that will gray their hairs and age their faces, imparting the gravity that so many Americans mistakenly attribute to the mere pressures of holding office.
Only a few privileged insiders know that this visible aging has almost nothing to do with anything these historical figures face as Chief Executive, and everything to do with the ordeal they all survive on the first day sleeping under the White House roof.
It will be the same for the next New President, and for the next President after that, and all New Presidents, for as long as the Republic stands.
As illustration we join one New President, just now joining the pantheon after a career spent in preparation for his place in history. Completing his first night's sleep in the residence, he does not dream of his busy next day's itinerary, or of all the terrible mistakes that can torpedo his place in history, or even (his recurring nightmare) of standing before an Press Conference of thousands, naked but for that mouthy bitch from the NEW YORK TIMES, clad in dominatrix gear as she warns, Now, remember, you asked for this. He dreams of nothing. For this night, at least, he has accomplished all of his waking dreams and has no room for sleeping ones.
Exhausted, he is all but comatose, and incapable of noticing when the Secret Service enters to sedate the First Lady and quietly hustle her from the Residence.
He does not know, because he has not yet been told, that this happens on the first morning of every new President's administration, and that the operatives who just removed his wife are the very same ones who performed this mission for five previous Administrations. They may be elderly, by now, but by God they're efficient.
The New President doesn't wake until several minutes later, when some dim impulse of his reptilian brain alerts him to the dark silhouette looming over him. He opens his eyes, registers the metallic glint of the hatchet beginning its murderous descent, and rolls away just as the blade strikes home and the pillow erupts in a mushroom cloud of liberated feathers.
Cursing, not yet understanding why his morning has become an arena for mortal combat, the New President scrambles away, tumbles off the opposite end of the bed, and rises to his knees just in time to see his assailant circle around the footboard. His eyes, recently touted in National Review as "firm and unwavering," become pale confused things as he registers the familiar, iconic face of the figure stalking him: a face all too familiar from dollar bills, textbooks, and commercials for President's Day sales, distorted now by the kind of murderous bloodlust that has never been depicted on paintings of him crossing the Delaware.
The New President knows, with the certainty derived from divine revelation, that this is not an imposter, not an actor, not a crazed assassin with a Founding Father fetish. This is the real George Washington, down to the gentle eyes and lipless mouth, miraculously returned to life in a murderous frenzy. He's wearing a blue waistcoat and white leggings and an expression of undying hatred and that is all the new President has time to register before the mad Father of Our Country is upon him, and he has to scuttle across the floor in his pajamas, screaming for the Secret Service to come and rescue him.
The Secret Service will not answer. When it comes to this important part of every President's first day, they never do. But they do watch on their monitors and they do nod with approval as the New President uses a lamp off the nightstand to block the next slash from Washington's hatchet. They nod and they observe the resourcefulness with which the New President parries another slash and stumbles to his feet, still screaming for the help that they are duty-bound to withhold. They admire this President for rising to the challenge right away, in a manner that so many others have not. That big bully of a Texan, for instance, the one so talented at picking up little dogs by the ears? Whimpered like a girl at this point. The peanut farmer? Soiled himself. W? Imagined himself under attack by the Quaker on the Oatmeal box. But the New President is a genuine profile in courage. He stands his ground and he parries another attack and though the next hammering blow almost knocks him over he not only manages to regain his fair and balanced position but also presses his advantage, driving the lamp into Washington's forehead with a sickening crunch loud enough to be heard in Baltimore.
Washington's eyes roll up. He drops the hatchet, staggers backward, and collapses onto the New President's bed, as dead now as he's been presumed to be for centuries.
The New President staggers over to the bed, and stares down at the remains of a face he had known as well as his own. He touches his attacker's cheek with an index finger, expecting to find a mask of some kind, but no. It's flesh, all right. Once again he tries to persuade himself that this is just an assassin who merely happens to look like George Washington, but the vivid reality of the moment argues against that interpretation. This is George Washington.
That's when the New President notices that his First Lady is missing.
For the first time he feels a frisson of panic.
He is not a romantic man, this new President. He does not love his wife in any passionate manner, and at this moment cannot recall just how many times during the transition he succeeded in, well, flying the colors, but he has grown used to her presence, and he does count on her companionship in this rarefied enterprise their shared lives have become. The prospect of her trapped somewhere in this legendary house, perhaps fighting for her life against a murderous Martha Washington, fills him with a dread that no threat to his own life can match. He cries out her name and races to the door, which is course sealed and will not be opened for him no matter how furiously he demands to know the meaning of this dammit.
Watching this scene play out on the monitors, with the gathered members of the Secret Service, the Chief of Staff thinks about his own hidden passion for horror movies and the rule, well-known to enthusiasts of the form, that any endangered person pounding on a door and crying for help is in fact about to be attacked from behind. He watches the shadowy figure as it comes into frame behind the New President, winces as that figure comes into focus, and finds himself murmuring, "Turn around! Turn around!", the same way he would for any luckless heroine menaced by Jason or Freddy or Norman Bates. He closes his eyes, unwilling to see the clutching hands wrapped around his old friend's neck, and therefore entirely misses the moment when the New President, sensing something wrong, whirls to confront the not only obnoxious and disliked, but thoroughly deranged, visage of President John Adams.
The New President is not as fanatical a historian as some of his predecessors, but he has seen the portraits, and he recognizes the intent signaled by the second President's murderous glare. Shock paralyzes him and provides him no means of defense against the fingers closing on his neck. His air supply already cut off, he braces himself against the locked door and propels himself forward, driving Adams across the room and into a two-hundred-year-old armoire procured by the Madisons. A crystal pitcher topples, rolls, falls to the floor and shatters. Adams' grip does not waver. The man who brought the Revolution into being by sheer force of personality is not to be deterred by a little bruising. The New President feels his world grow black at the edges. He drives Adams into the dresser a second time, and a third. The two men spin again and hit the floor in a tangle of thrashing chief executive limbs. Still Adams does not weaken. The New President flails about for a weapon, finds a shard of broken crystal, drives the point into his assailant's eye, and the rest, the coin a phrase, is History.
Even as he collapses against the bureau, gasping, massaging a throat now marked by an angry red line, a new wariness shines in the New President's eyes. He may be slow on the uptake sometimes, but he achieved his station in life by anticipating trends. He can prognosticate the further course of his morning, without any recourse to pollsters or focus groups or even paid special counsel. He knows who's coming next.
And indeed, here he comes, bursting from the Presidential Lavatory in an insane frenzy. It's Thomas Jefferson, the architect of Monticello, the composer of the Declaration of Independence and the impregnator of Sally Hemings, perhaps the most articulate man ever to hold the venerable title of President, now reduced to a gutteral howl as he advances on the current office-holder, wielding his quill pen like a stiletto. He is a product of the Age of Reason, and the New President tries to reason with him in kind, assuring him that these unprovoked hostilities are unnecessary, and can be avoided by a few rounds of peaceful negotiation. But Jefferson's advance is as resolute as his prose was pellucid, and he doesn't even slow down as he jabs his quill at the New President's heart.
Reacting at the very last second, and then only with a sadness that all but paralyzes him, the New President retreats to his right, as so many New Presidents are apt to, surviving with a mere gash in his upper bicep. Retreating, also in the manner of so many New Presidents before him, he backs against the wall, and finds himself whimpering as the implement that forged nations makes fresh bloody edits to his shoulders, forearms, and right cheek. Only when Jefferson draws back, with a flourish only possible for a statesman that accomplished at penmanship, does the New President finally react to the clear and present danger and counter-attack, with a body slam that drives the pride of Virginia back, halfway across the room and back onto the bed. By then the New President has ripped the quill from Jefferson's hand and driven it, screaming, into the great man's neck.
But that, of course, is not the end of it.
The long night continues in precisely that vein, with one murderous figure after another, all but a few of them, in accordance with their respective marks on history, as unmemorable as assailants as they were as Presidents. Indeed, the New President experiences more than a little difficulty just identifying some of these figures by sight.
Only a few stand out from the pack, and they're not always the most dangerous.
William Henry Harrison, for instance, advances only halfway across the bedroom before wheezing, coughing, and then falling flat on his face, dead.
And James Buchanan fights like a girl.
But Abraham Lincoln, who split rails as a youth, is a deadly combatant indeed, his woodman's axe extending the already prodigious reach of his deceptively muscular arms.
And Grover Cleveland, the only President to serve two non-consecutive terms, follows the paradigm set down by most cinematic mad slashers by rising from the statesman-strewn floor, with fresh malice, after a brief and ineffective interregnum of an assault by Benjamin Harrison.
The New President is gasping, his pajamas in tatters, his skin marked by a dozen wounds of varying severity, by the time the predecessors assaulting him begin to include figures from the Twentieth Century. Here he needs all the strength his exhausted body can muster, because these newcomers turn out to be among the most dangerous.
Sportsman, soldier, and avid hunter Theodore Roosevelt is almost impossible to put down, his savage leer and sheer love of killing rendering him the battle's equivalent of Rasputin. The New President shatters almost every valuable antique in the room just to take him down and even then needs to reduce his own fingers to hamburger just prying the man's jaws from his ankle.
The obese William Howard Taft is almost as formidable: in part because he almost crushes the New President to death with the weight of his own body, in part because the New President, by now wielding the sword of Ulysses S. Grant, inflicts six or seven wounds to the fiend's massive stomach without once penetrating deep enough to nick any of the man's vital organs. That battle doesn't end until the New President musters the last of his fading strength to force the fat man into the bathtub, which Taft has historically been unable to escape. Wedged in tight, rippling with enraged avoirdupois, Taft can only grope with hands like sausages as the New President fills the tub with water and fries his predecessor with a casual toss of the First Lady's hair dryer.
Calvin Coolidge turns out to have some stuff. He's not as tough as some of the others, but he remains spookily silent, never emitting so much as a grunt as he pursues his dark, murderous vendetta. He would make a scary mad slasher in a mid-eighties horror movie. Standing over his mangled body, the New President feels certain that he's just dispatched the deadliest of the creatures he'll have to face before the likes of Kennedy and Nixon, but the worst foe yet, the most deceptively powerful, turns out to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who emerges crawling out from under the bed, his withered and nigh-useless legs not nearly as decisive a factor as the compensating over-developed musculature of his arms. Almost falling to the man's first attack due to overconfidence, when he cannot escape Roosevelt's powerful grip, the New President squirms free, regains his feet, and enjoys a few relatively easy minutes just strolling out of the New Dealer's way, while reviewing strategies to use against the small handful of figures still left to confront. He puts off the inevitable longer than he truly has to, because taking down Roosevelt, the very symbol of strength over adversity, feels dirtier than anything he's had to do so far. But there comes a moment for even the greatest President to realize that he's used up every peaceful alternative. He shakes his head sadly. And goes to the closet to get his golf clubs.
After that, things get easier. Not only are the newcomers just echoes of the greater men who came before them, but the stakes of the battle have, like the stakes of so many battles fought by so many Chief Executives, left the New President detached from the carnage he has wrought. He has killing down to a science now, and as he wades like a titan through a bedroom increasingly deep with sprawled bodies, he resists a total descent into hysteria by constantly reminding himself that history itself limits the number of attackers he still has left to beat.
Taking out Kennedy requires gaining the height advantage and then taking him from behind.
Lyndon Johnson surprises the New President by taking himself out of the fight.
Nixon is a squirmy, shifty-eyed bastard, a lot like a rabid ferret. He inflicts a number of savage, ravenous bites on the New President's leg before going down from a ceremonial plate to a skull. (The New President, feeling giddy by now, shouts, "Normalize relations with this China, you asshole!")
Ford has the body of a fullback, but the coordination of Inspector Clouseau. He trips on his first charge and slams head first into the television, imploding the picture tube and frying his brains.
Carter's attack seems perfunctory, despite the bloodlust in his heart.
Reagan has the martial arts moves of a man who pretends toughness but in truth learned all he knows from the movies.
Bush the Elder attempts the same moves as Reagan but can't fake the conviction.
William Jefferson Clinton proves almost impossible to pin down, but eventually succumbs as well.
Bush the Younger, clad not in the jacket and tie favored by so many of the others, but in a flight suit with a suspicious bulge in the crotch, steps back after landing a couple of early blows, smirks in imagined victory as he declares the fight over, and doesn't even seem to notice as his feet sink into a quagmire of steaming corpses.
It continues.
The Next President. The Next President After That..
However many other Presidents rise to confront the new man before he exhausts the history that came before him.
But eventually he crushes the skull of his most recent predecessor, stands in a room unthreatened by invasion by his enemies, and knows the ordeal is over.
The New President, or what's left of him, stands bloody but unbowed among the unmoving stuff of stamps and monuments, free for the first time to wonder what this has all been about, knowing in his heart that he's just been made privy to something greater than himself. He feels stronger for the experience, but also diminished. He does not understand.
Then the doors unlock, and the First Aid crews arrive to patch his wounds and slather makeup over his bruises, and the Chief of Staff arrives to assure him that none of what's happened here will be allowed to impact his appointment schedules.
The New President regards the eager faces of his advisors, and for the first time reaches the epiphany that's been denied him up until now.
It's not over. His true ordeal is yet to come.
Someday, he will have a successor, and another successor after that, and yet another successor after that. And he will never know a lasting peace, for as long as the Republic endures.
He will always be pulled from retirement or the hereafter to appear in this room on the first day of every new Administration, to participate in this one savage rite of passage, required of all who hold his office.
And at long last he understands why, too.
There's only one reason why every New President would need to spend his first night in office weathering the hostility of all the Presidents who came before him.
Because, if history is any indication, he will likely spend the rest of his Administration earning it.
Now gray and eminent, fully vested in his office in a manner he's never been before, the New President strides into the hallway, his footsteps echoing behind him not at all.