American History Revised by Jr. Seymour Morris Read Free Book Online Page B

president, and drafted a whimsical response. Naturally it did not go over very well: “Tell him I would not quit the field to be vice president … unless he will give me bond, with sureties, in the full sum of his four years’salary, that he will die or resign within three months after his inauguration.” Six weeks after Lincoln’s inauguration, Lincoln died—and the man who took his place was not Benjamin Butler.
    Theodore Roosevelt was always guarded whenever he spoke of the presidency. Earlier, when he had been a rising politician as police commissioner of New York, the muckraking journalists Jacob Riis and Lincoln Steffens had asked him if he was actively working to become president someday. TR blew up: “Don’t you dare ask me that. Don’t you put such ideas into my head. No friend of mine would ever say a thing like that.” He continued his rant:
    Never, never, you must never either of you remind a man at work on a political job that he may be President. It almost always gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility. I, for instance, I am going to do great things here, hard things that require all the courage, ability, work that I am capable of….But if I get to thinking of what it might lead to … I must be wanting to be President. Every young man does. But I won’t let myself think of it; I must not, because if I do, I will begin to work for it, I’ll be careful, I’ll be calculating, cautious in word and act, and so—I’ll beat myself, see?
    Of course TR—a man who could never sit still—must have thought frequently of becoming president. But he never hesitated to make enemies if that was the price of doing what he thought was right. On one occasion as governor, when he had to decide whether to have a female murderer executed, he was bluntly told, “If you do not pardon this woman, you will never be president.” He rejected the advice and went ahead anyway.
    In September 1901, eighteen months after a vice president had died, it became a president’s turn to die, this one by assassination, and so Theodore Roosevelt became president because of two deaths in the wrong order and two men who turned down the opportunity.
Barely Got Off the Ground
    1939 One of America’s favorite movies almost never got funded, was rejected by the director’s first choice of male star, and failed to win an Oscar. It is the most famous movie of all time:
Gone with the Wind.
When Louis B. Mayer was considering bidding for the film rights to Margaret Mitchell’s novel, his MGM production chief told him, “Forget it, Louis, no Civil War picture ever made a nickel.” Clark Gable ended up with the Rhett Butler role only because the first choice, Gary Cooper, turned it down. In the Oscar voting that year, the winner was
Wuthering Heights.
    In the late 1950s, MGM was going bankrupt, so it bet the house on a blockbuster movie, easily the most expensive movie at the time, requiring three hundredsets scattered over 340 acres. The movie was about the life of one man. For this all-critical role, it sought the services of Burt Lancaster. He turned it down. So, too, did Paul Newman and Rock Hudson. Finally, Charlton Heston accepted the part, and
Ben-Hur
went on to win eleven Academy Awards and earn five times its original investment, one of the most profitable movies ever made.
    Another of America’s cultural icons also was a total “hit or miss”:
Reader’s Digest.
When Dewitt Wallace came up with the idea in 1920, he prepared two hundred copies of a “dummy” issue and sent it to magazine publishers and other potential backers. No one was interested. Finally, on his wedding day in 1928, he made a final effort and tried a new approach to launching a magazine. Foregoing the judgment of publishing industry experts who scorned the newfangled idea of direct mail, Wallace conducted a subscription-solicitation mailing to several thousand potential readers. Upon his return from his honeymoon two weeks later, he found