are the doodles by U.S. presidents actually art?
I don’t think any of them really are art. They’re more representative of the personalities of the people who drew them. I’ve come to admire some of the presidents just because of their doodles. What I really liked about Eisenhower’s doodles, for example, is that you get a sense of the incredible historical pressure this one human being must feel. He literally is the most powerful person in the world. These kinds of pressures show themselves in Eisenhower’s doodles in the many drawings of broken fingers, broken pencils and missiles going in the wrong direction. Always a broken phallic symbol of some sort, as if the mandate is just too much. And it is too much. You see him as a human being, a guy called Ike, and also as the president who’s supposed to have this official status. The gap between the two personas is very visible in some of his doodles. You can almost hear the speech he made when he left the presidency, the warning that he sent out to the U.S. about what was happening with t
