re: #106 Ziggy_TARDIS

Also, being a bit of an asshole, and pretending that he lost control of a car going into a lake. Only to show it was an Amphibious Car.

How did the Secret Service handle LBJ?

The rest of that Cracked article is pretty fucking epic, too; for example:

#4. Franklin D. Roosevelt: Slapstick President

The esteemed Franklin D. Roosevelt had a knack for mischievous humor and real difficulty keeping his mouth shut when he came up with something that amused him. An example: According to a relative, FDR once managed to cause a mild diplomatic emergency over the correct way to cook goddamn Brussels sprouts. The so-called Sprout Incident happened in the latter stages of World War II, when Roosevelt started giving shit to Winston Churchill’s wife over the fact that English people boil sprouts (justified), and then proceeded to punk her with a number of completely ass-pulled “better” recipes (slightly less justified). Eventually, FDR pulled John Winant, U.S. ambassador to Britain, into the mess, embarrassing him thoroughly.

The Churchills presumably fed Winant a lot of FDR’s messed-up recipes after that, because the next time he saw the president, Winant promptly told him he was a diplomat and not a fucking foodster, and that he’d resign in a second if Roosevelt ever pulled a stunt like that again. This is probably the closest to a “Now listen here, you little shit …” talk anyone has ever given a president — or, for that matter, a Roosevelt.

John “Balls of Adamantium” Winant, ladies and gentlemen.

Apart from randomly insulting English cuisine, FDR was also fond of puns and dad jokes. He’d call his secretary of the treasury just to make him guess who he was in bed with, only to eventually reveal that the answer was “A sore throat.” However, he was also a massive fan of simple, slapstick-style practical jokes. As a child, he’d freak out nurses by putting Alka-Seltzer in their chamber pots. As president, he’d summon reporters for a “massively important” press conference and have them meet a random farmer who proceeded to give the media a lengthy lecture about the importance of stud bulls. In physical therapy, he discovered that if he relaxed his legs at the exact right moment, his therapist would lose her balance and fall in the swimming pool, a revelation that caused him endless joy. Once, FDR even deliberately stranded a member of the Secret Service on the roof of a farm building by ordering him to scale said building, then bribing a dude to remove the ladder. He was that kind of guy.

As annoying as the whole slapstick shtick probably was, it may have been a blessing in disguise. When FDR dropped the pie-in-the-face act and started getting sneaky, things got pretty terrifying for his peers. He set up situations where he and his aides grimly informed the extremely human-rights-minded attorney general that, due to Pearl Harbor, he was to draft an act that forbade the freedom of discussion and information. They kept the ruse going for five full minutes, and as the panicked attorney general tried to argue against the idea, they all burst out laughing to his face. FDR also tried to trick the secretary of the treasury (yes, him again), who evidently took a Ron Burgundy approach to his speeches, to blurt out some very unstatesmanlike things during an address. (The man noticed the “unsavory things” in the script and abruptly ended it before he spoke them out loud.) In a particularly inspired move, Roosevelt even managed to prank call a number of well-known White House correspondents and recruit them as spokespeople for a famous laxative.

Consider that for a moment: The most famous voice in America prank called the very people whose job is to listen to him and convinced them to take up a new career as paid faces of a poop medicine. That is the kind of mind that gets to be president.