James Buchanan had a troubled relationship with his father. A distant and somewhat effeminate man, James Buchanan Sr. had eleven children who strangely enough looked totally different from him or each other. Young James Buchanan Jr. was much closer to his mother Elizabeth Speer a scion of the German family that produced such luminaries as the Third Reich’s Albert Speer. He spent much of his youth helping her at the family business the Buchanan hotel until an unfortunate incident with a young woman and a spring pump and a kitchen knife. Young Master Buchanan was sent off to boarding school never to return but he did enjoy dressing in some of his mother’s discarded homespun frocks so he might feel closer to her.
He was estranged from his father for the remainder of his life but strangely enjoyed calling his roommate of many decades, Senator and later Vice President William Rufus King by his pet diminutive of Daddy. Unlike Andrew Jackson who called them Nancy and Fancy. Not that theres anything wrong with that.
(Whose You’re Daddy, Presidential Fathers, Doris Kearns Godwin, Bantam Books, 1998)
(Whose You’re Daddy, Presidential Fathers, Doris Kearns Godwin, Bantam Books, 1998)
1 comment:
Might have been worse. He might have called the senator P Diddy Daddy.
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